Black Music Research Newsletter v9 no1 1987

BLACK MUSIC RESEARCH
NEWSLETTER <. B \I I{
COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO
Vol. 9, No. 1 ISSN Number 0271-3799 Spring 1987
Black Music in New Orleans: A Historical Overview
by Curtis D. Jerde, Tulane University
Long before the more prominent
metropolitan centers of today (e.g.,
New York, Chicago, Los Angeles) could
claim the distinction, New Orleans
qualified as the nation's music capitol.
Historian Henry A. Kmen's Music in
New Orleans: The Fonnative Years, 1791-
1841, published by Louisiana State Uni­versity
Press in il.966, tells the story of
America's first music city. In his preface,
Kmen makes reference to the Crescent
City as a cultural center, "one which in
its own way, rivaled the fabled 'flower­ing
of New England.'"
As Professor Kmen intimates,
nineteenth-century New Orleans pos­sessed
a rich and varied musical prod­uct
ranging from philharmonic to
popular sensibilii!y, and including both
sacred and secular involvement. The
growth of vernacular idioms is, how­ever,
most characteristic of musical de­velopment
indigenous to New Orleans
in its history. Based upon an accultura­tive
process quite probably at work al­ready
in the colonial period, band
music and dance music have especially
defined the sound of New Orleans,
contemporaneously as well as histori­cally.
A plurality of ethnic influences
has blended in a pattern of shared tra­ditions
forged within the context of
common urban folk experience.
Preeminent in this melange of ethnic
influences, a seminally important chap­ter
in black music history took shape
in the Crescent City. Kmen (1966, viii)
states that nineteenth-century New Or­leans
gave residence to "the largest
Negro population, both slave and free,
of any American city." Accordingly, it
served as the site of some of the earliest
and most extensive Afro-American
music development of any urban com­munity
in the nation ..
Black musical activity in New Or­leans
dates back to at least the last de­cade
of the eighteenth century. In keep­ing
with the cultural character of the
community, and consistent with an
overriding motif of the black musical
heritage, it began primarily in connec­tion
with dance activity. Moreover, it
had strong association with the growth
of a pervasive street and saloon ambi­ence.
Case in point: in April of 1799 the
Spanish colonial government granted
one Bernardo Coquet permission to
begin holding public dances at his es­tablishment
on St. Phillips Street for
people of Afro-American descent. The
dialogue surrounding this transaction
strongly suggests that such functions
had actually occurred there, and at
comparable establishments in the city,
for some years prior to that. Black
people in New Orleans not only at­tended
them, chances are that they pro­vided
the music as well, though no
documentation exists by which to
prove it. As in other established urban
centers of the old South, blacks
routinely provided music for dancing
in New Orleans, for themselves as well
as for wrote society. White people in
fact looked upon it as a demeaning oc­cupation.
Only when professional
musicians otherwise occupied playing
concerts or in the theaters condes-cended
to play dance music for special
occasions did white musicians as a rule
deviate from that norm.
Blacks in early New Orleans not only
gathered to dance indoors at public
facilities, they also indulged them­selves
in such recreation in the open
air. Such outdoor promenades antici­pated
a cultural pattern that became
customary all the way into the jazz age,
when such gatherings become memor­able
at sites like hlstoric Lincoln Park.
During the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, slaves (and possi­bly
even freemen in some instances)
danced in designated open expanses,
ostensibly only at times prescribed by
law. Place Congo (Congo Square)
served as the designated area in that
period.
Motivated by intentions to con­struct
a plantation economy, the
Spanish colonial government had in
fact taken action in the decade follow­ing
the American Revolution to give
impetus to growth of the slave popu­lation.
In addition to newly arrived
slaves, some blacks undoubtedly also
migrated with the Loyalist element
fleeing the English colonies along the
eastern seaboard in the wake of the
British defeat. Open-air dancing, per­mitted
pragmatically, it would seem,
as a measure of control, probably did
not necessitate the imposition of
statutory proscription until the slave
population had increased as signifi­cantly
as it did in the 1780s. Krnen
Continued on page 2
2
New Orleans, continued
(1966, 226) indicates that with cer­tainty
such concern dates at least to
1786, given the passage in that year
of a law which "forbade slaves to
dance in public squares on sundays
and holy days until the close of the
evening service ."
The above-mentioned law in fact re­stricted
such activity to Sundays, and
in Place Congo only. The scenario that
ensued paralleled similar situations in
the West Indies. As in the Caribbean,
musical performance in the beginning
seems to have reflected the African
folk roots of the people. As related by
architect Henry Latrobe during a visit
to the citv in 1819, it "consisted of two
drums a"nd a stringed instrument"
(Kmen 1966, 227). The people sang in
call and response format to their ac­companiment
and did a ring dance to
the rhythms emitted. However,
others observed a more eclectic re­tinue,
with fifes and fiddles
documented as having appeared as
early as 1799.
The Caribbean connection repre­sents
an especially vital linkage for
black musical development in New
Orleans. By the second decade of the
nineteenth century, the arrival of a
substantial number of West Indians,
both slave and free, had mushroomed
the black population in the Crescent
City substantially. Situated as it is on
the northern rim, New Orleans actu­ally
counts as a Caribbean commun­ity,
and the transit of musicians back
and forth has left a considerable i.rn­pression
upon the city's vernacular
musical style. Both the jazz and
rhythm and blues traditions endemic
to th e city convey rhythmic elements
suggestive of West Indian influence.
The arrival of a West Indian contin­gent
of blacks in the early nineteenth
century bolstered New Orleans's com­plement
of free blacks in particular.
Predicated upon the social advan­tages
they enjoyed, this group
brought with them a wealth of educa­tion
and cultural richness which man­ifested
itself in much musical facility.
Like an analogous component of
Afro-American society then already
present in New Orleans, they had
ready access to European musical
training.
This element would form the
backbone of a community of Creoles
of Color in the city, critical for the cul­tural
inroads it pr0vided, especially
in terms of musical development.
Open avenues of approach to theaters
and ballrooms brought the Creoles in
contact, directly and indirectly, with
the classical tradition of European
music. As a result of such exposure,
midway through the antebellum age
a Negro Philharmonic Society would
emerge. Its emergence signified the
rise of an exemplary cadre of schooled
musicians. In addition to concert ac­tivity,
they performed at the Renais­sance
Theatre, the first of a number
of black musical theater establish­ments
that would grace the city's cul­ti..
ral terrain over the years. In time a
veritable honor roll of internationally
recognized musical figures would de­rive
from their midst, including
such illustrious names as Edmond
Dede, Basile Bares, Lucien Lambert,
Eugene V. Macarty, and in the jazz
period, Ferdinand Joseph LeMenth
(Lamothe?), better known as Jelly Roll
Morton.
Possibly the most important trans­ference
of European influence affect­ing
the heritage of black music in New
Orleans involved the cultivation of a
band tradition. It served as the prim­ary
seedbed for the development of a
jazz idiom. Black band music fi rst
began appearing in the early years of
the nineteenth century in response to
the city's need for martial music.
The influx of freedom subsequent
to the war, and the eclipse of civil
rights that constituted the disappoint­ing
denouncement of emancipation,
ironically created a situation fertile for
black band development. Because of­ficial
America would not accept the
sociopolitical obligations of caring for
its newly emancipated citizens, freed­men
in New Orleans were left to do
so themselves through a network of
social-aid and pleasure sodalities.
These organizations customarily pro­vided
music for the various activities
they sponsored in accomodation of
their membership, e .g., parades, fu­nera
ls, and dances.
The on-rush of freedmen, and the
proliferation of black social-aid and
pleasure organizations it generated,
dictated a need for black band musi-cians
far outstripping the available
supply. That situation prompted the
germination of band academies oper­ated
by itinerant "professors," in
many cases drawn from the ranks of
New Orleans's free blacks of antebel­lum
musical vin tage. Some of these
schools actually existed outside the
city proper and served as conduits
through which musicians from the im­mediate
hinterland passed eventually
to take up residence in New Orleans.
The black band academy estab­lished
by Uptown New Orleans
bandmaster James B. Humphrey, in
Plaquemines Parish south of the city,
symbolized this cultural phenome­non
most expressively. The Eclipse
Brass Band founded by Humphrey at
Magnolia Plantation counted among
a host of ensembles that emerged in
this period as progenitors of the black
bands that formed in the twentieth
century. It, along with the Excelsior
Brass Band, the Eureka Brass Band,
the Onward Brass Band, the Deer
Range Band (also a product of Mag­nolia
Plantation), the Pelican Brass
Band (witr which Humphrey also
played and eventually led), the
Pickwick Brass Band, the St. Joseph
Brass Band, and the original Olympia
Brass Band, helped make up this first
wave of black bands that sprung from
the city. They set an important prece­dent
and generated vital momentum
for numerous ensembles that fol­lowed.
Later, Oscar "Papa" Celestin's
Tuxedo Orchestra, the John Robi­chaW<
Orchestra, A. J. Peron's Society
Orchestra, and the Claiborne William's
Orchestra were among the city's
"sweet jazz" ensembles that de­scended
from the Creole of Color
heritage.
The names listed above represent
the larger, well-established ensembles
of the city in the period of the city's
initial black band explosion. Their
membership consisted of trained
musicians, often with lineage leading
back to the philhannonic heritage of
the antebellum free blacks. Other
small combinations existed as well,
however, within the ne·ighborhoods.
The band led by Charles "Buddy" Bol­den
best exemplifies that category.
Understandably, with the di­minished
availability of musicians,
the neighborhood groups could not
effectively compete with the estab­lished
organizations for personnel
and therefore had to play with some
parts missit,g, a factor that encour­aged
them to take greater liberties in
their ensemble play in order to fill out
the sound. This led to the loose m,rn·
ner of play associated with early New
Orleans jazz, misconstrued by many
observers from a retrospective van­tage
point as collective improvisation.
Accounts given as part of oral history
interviews conducted by the Tulane
Jazz Archive, however, indicate that
these performers actually considered
what they did as the playing of voiced
parts (Bocage 1959; Henry 1959;
Ridgley 1959).
These smaller bands found the bis­tros
(or "tonks") and dancehalls
spread throughout the neighbor­hoods
as habitat more natural for their
musical purposes. Whether playing
for a street procession or for dancers,
however, the music of New Orleans's
black bands left a prevailing impres­sion
upon the city. Afro-Americans
predominated within the city's under­class
community and accordingly
exercised a prevailing influence over
the cultivation of an urban folk musi­cal
culture.
Street and saloon music as a cultural
outgrowth of the New Orleans under­class
community provided the breed­ing
ground for jazz and related ver­nacular
musical idioms such as
rhythm and blues. The city's black
musical heritage has had a central role
in that development. While black
bands represent an important compo­nent
of the black musical contribution
to the city's urban folk cultural history,
other elements also played an impor­tant
part. String bands and piano
players contributed to that ambience
as well, forming yet another element
in the growth of jazz and in the blues
fermentation.
String music of a vernacular nature
began making its appearance in the
streets and saloons of New Orleans
early in the city's history. Solo perfor­mers
appeared first, it would seem,
with a black violinist named Massa
Quamba gaining particular promi­nence
in the antebellum age.
Documentation reveals him perform­ing
frequently for white clientele, but
undoubtedly he found time to per-form
for black dancers as well. We
know of other black fiddlers also, both
free and slave. Edmund Dede, the
brilliant performer, composer, and
conductor, played violin. The instru­ment
appeared in Congo Square dur­ing
the early epoch, intimating its use
bv slaves.
, Black musicians within New Or­leans's
street and saloon environment
also played the banjo, likely an instru­ment
of ethnic African derivation. A
Picayw1e Butler, for example, earned
a considerable reputation playing
aboard the riverboats in and out of
the Crescent City. It served as a prece­dent
for successive generations of
black musicians who earned their
livelihood performing on riverboats.
The practice extended into the jazz
period, when bands such as those led
by Fate Marable on the Streckfus
steamboats employed numerous jazz
musicians.
By the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries this combination
had evolved into the instrumentation
that comprised the hot string bands
that ushered in the jazz era, typified
by the Woodland Band led by Edward
"Kid" Ory. It began as a "spasm
band," consisting of kids with
homemade instruments.
Ory arrived in New Orleans with
his Woodland Band around 1908. He
began working Storyville establish­ments
almost immediately, most no­tably
Pete Lala's 25 Club where he
would eventually make the acquain­tance
of Joseph "King" Oliver, Louis
Armstrong, Lorenzo 1io, Zue
Robertson, and Henry Zeno. In that
time, Tom Anderson., proprietor of the
Arlington House and unofficial mayor
of the District, routinely employed
hot string bands comprised of black
musicians at his Annex. They also per­formed
frequently at Miss Cole's
Lawn Parties on Josephine Street in
the Uptown. These ensembles distin­guished
themselves by their folk ori­gins
and preoccupations as well as the
precocious caliber of their member­ship.
Members commonly learned to
play a variety of instruments, ulti­mately
metamorphosizing into wind­band
combinations.
From the standpoint of folk antece­dants,
the ragtime phenomenon and
the foundations of blackface min-
3
strelsy have much bearing upon the
rise of jazz in New Orleans. String
bands correlate with the latter influ­ence,
windbands with the former.
However, prior to the advent of the
ragtime band, black piano artistry
shaped the development of ragtime.
Standardlv associated with the Mis­souri
region, a vernacular style of
piano seems to have grown up in New
Orleans at approximately the same
time historically. Playing a "bar­relhouse"
style, these pianists, who
traversed a circuit of mining and
lumber camps, also found employ­ment
in the tenderloin establishments
of the Crescent City. We cannot docu­ment
their identity until the twentieth
century when the names Jelly Roll
Morton, Tony Jackson, Alfred Wilson,
James White, Sammy Davis, Albert
Carroll, and Buddy Carter emerge
from the late stages of ragtime de·
velopment from which jazz arose.
The barrel house players anticipated
not only the development of ragtime
and its jazz progeny, but also the ap­pearance
of blues in New Orleans. We
can document the presence of the
blues at least by the immediate post­World
War I period when Armstrong
talks of playing them for the girls
in the "tonks," most notably with his
trio at the Brick House in Algiers
(Armstrong 1954, 150-153). Arm­strong,
of course, particularly exem­plified
the street-and-saloon nexus of
New Orleans's black musical heritage,
having grown up near South Rampart
Street and spent much time in the
legendary area known as "the
battlefield" (Perdido Street and South
Rampart).
Blues opened the portals to a gener­ation
of black female perforn,ers in
New Orleans as it did elsewhere in
urban America. Emerging in the Cres­cent
City were Ann Cook, Mamie
Desdounes, Lizzie Miles, and Sweet
Emma Barrett, who finished her illus­trious
career at Preservation Hall.
Brass band and dance music consti­tuted
the secular dimension of New
Orleans's black vernacular musical
heritage. The ci ty has also proven it­self
a fertile ground for the growth of
the sacred sound. Kmen quotes Fre­derick
Olmstead's description of one
Co11fi11ued 011 page 4
4
New Orleans, continued
Sunday morning's experience in the
1850s: "The congregation sang; I think
everyone joined, even the children,
and the collective sound was wonder­ful.
The voices of one or two women
rose above the rest, and one of these
soon began to introduce varia­tions
... . Many of the singers kept
time with their feet, balancing them­selves
on each alternately and swing­ing
their bodies accordingly." As
Kmen relates it, Olmstead describes
how the preacher then "raised his
own voice above all, clapped his
hands, and commenced to dance"
(Kmen 1966, 236).
In the twentieth century this spir­ited,
evangelical legacy carried over
into the gospel sound. Though her
musical power would ultimately sur­face
in Chicago where she made con•
tact with Thomas Andrew Dorsey,
Mahalia Jackson grew up in New Or­leans
and began by singing in that
city's black chUTches. Others followed
Composers Comer
in her footsteps. An alumnus of the
city's formative gospel activity of the
early twentieth century, Professor
J. W. Williams, now eighty-eight years
of age, remains active to the present
day. Along with Dr. Edwin Hogan
and Elliott Beal, who served as
Mahalia's hometown accompanist on
repeated occasions, Prof. Williams
has proven a powerful influence for
numerous gospel performers who
have followed-Wallace Davenport,
Frank Lastie, Harold Lewis, and Rev.
Paul Morton to name but a few.
For its heritage as America's "music
city," New Orleans owes much to the
black music tradition that impelled it.
The vernacular character of its music,
like that which pervades national
musical development, emerged in
large part due to the black musical
legacy imparted upon it. Like the na­tion
as a whole, the saga surrounding
that relationship bears the paradoxical
overtones of a peoiPle who have had
to make their sound heard despite the
anomalous distinction of having per-
Six Composers of Nineteenth-Century New Orleans
by Lucius R. Wyatt, Prairie View A & M University
The composers discussed in this
essay belonged to a distinct social and
ethnic class in nineteenth-century
New Orleans known variously as free
persons of color, gens de coule11r libre,
and black Creoles. Aside from their
mutual concern for economic survi­val,
the citizens of this group were
joined together by the French lan­guage,
their interest in French culture,
and their membership in the Catholic
Church. They attended performances
of the opera and of concert music and
maintained a strong devotion to
The author and editors express their appreci·
ation to Lester Sullivan, Archivist, Amistad Re­search
Center, Louisiana Music Colle,:tion; the
Archives and Manuscripts Department of the
Earl K. Long Library of the Universit)' of New
Orleans; Dominiq1Ue-Rene de Lerma; Daniel C.
Meyer, Associate Curator for Print and Manus­cript
Materials, William Jbnsom Hogan Jazz
Archive, Tulane University; and Bernard Bar­dct,
music reference librarian of the Bib­liotheque
Nationale, Paris, France, for their as­sistance
in the preparation of this article.
music and the arts. They encouraged
their children to study music without
the intention of pursuing it as a career.
Since they were people of reason­able
financial means, they often sent
their children away to the best schools
in the northeastern United States,
France, and other E.uropean countries
to be educated. Although they were
given certain freedoms, they were not
accorded the same social, political,
and economic position as whites.
After the Civil War the implementa­tion
of oppressive Jim Crow laws
posed greater difficulties for them. For
instance, a famous law suit of 1869
contested segregated seating in the St.
Charles Theatre, while prior to the
Civil War seats in theaters were avail­able
to any citizen who could pur­chase
a ticket. Moreover, the
Louisiana legislature enacted a
specific code that mandated that a per­son
with any amount of African blood
was, according to law, a Negro. The
effect of the new restrictions was that
sistent underclass existence thrust
upon them.
Mr. Jerde is Curator of tile William Ran­som
Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane Univer­sity,
New Orleans, Louisiana.
References
Armstrong, Louis. 1954!. Satchmo, my
life in New Orleans. New York:
Prentice-Hall.
Bocage, Peter. 1959. Oral history
interview. William Ransom Hogan
Jazz Archive, Tulane University.
Henry, Charles Sunny. 1959. Oral
history interview. William Ransom
Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane
University.
Kmen, Henry A. 1966. Music in New
Orleans: Tire formative years,
1791-1841. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press.
Ridgley, William Bebe. 1959. Oral
history interview.William Ransom
Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane
University.
all persons of African descent in New
Orleans-free blacks, former slaves,
and Creoles-came together in ex­pressing
their vocal opposition to the
legalized burdens imposed on them.
It was against this social and political
background that several talented com­posers
emerged.
The composers Basile Bares, Ed­mond
Dede, Lucien Lambert, Sidney
Lambert, Eugene V. Macarty, and
Samuel Snaer were born and reared
in New Orleans.' While the Lambert
brothers and Dede emigrated to other
countries in search of a broader range
of musical opportunities, Bares,
Macarty, and Snaer remained in the
city. Dede, a truly gifted musician
whose achievements were particu­larly
outstanding, was born of free pa·
rents who came to New Orleans from
the French West Indies. The compos­ers
wrote works for concert perform-
'Scholars and writers differ on the spelling
of the composers' names, an.d their birth and
death dates (see Appendix).
ance as well as pieces for social occa­sions,
including salon music for the
piano in the French musical tradition.
In some instances they composed
music for the church. Dede, an
orchestra conductor in Bordeaux,
France, wrote many works for the
stage.
As early as 1830 the Philharmonic
Society, an orchestra directed by Con­stantin
Deburque and Richard Lam­bert,
performed public concerts. As
the century progressed, despite the
disadvantages of the Civil War and
the subsequent problems of Recon­struction,
New Orleans remained a
fertile environment for music. In
studying the music of the period
1850-1900, it becomes clear that the
dance forms of black Creoles, consist­ing
of waltzes, polkas, mazurkas,
marches, and quadrilles, contained
elements that were used in the forma­tion
of jazz.
Basile Bares (1845-1902)
Basile Bares (Bazel' Bara') has been
described by several writers as a popu­lar
musician who exuded sensibilities
that were very Frencl1 in cl1aracter. At
an early age he obtained employment
with a Mr. Perrier who had a music
business specializing in French music.
On several occasions Perrier sent him
to Paris in the interest of his business.
On each of these trips abroad, Bares
renewed his ilnterest and love for
French culture. While working in Per­rier's
music business, Bares became a
performer at the piano, a piano tuner,
a teacher of music, and a composer.
Bares studied with Eugene Prevost,
the music director of the Theatre D'Or­leans.
His studies in harmony and
composition were with a Professor
Pedigram. ln 1867 he visited the Paris
Exposition and remained there for
four months performing in recitals.
Newspaper reports of the period in­dicate
that Bar-es was often engaged
as a pianist in performances in New
Orleans with Snaer, Macartv, and
Dede during his visits to the city. His
"Le belle creole: Quadrille des lanciers
americains" is dedicated to Eugene V.
Macarty.
His musical works consist of dance
pieces for the piano in the European
salon style of the period. Largely influ-enced
by his contact with French
music and his visits to Paris, Bares
wrote waltzes, mazurkas, polkas,
marches, galops, and quadrilles.
These are lighthearted pieces written
in d iatonic harmony and in com­pound
ternary form. Generally, the
pieces modulate to the key of the
dominant. Bares shows a special gift
in the creation of melodies in his com­positions.
His melodies and har­monies
are particularly interesting in
such pieces as "Le Creole: Polka
mazurka," "La seduisante: Grand
valse brilliant," anc! "Mamie Waltz."
Edmond Dede (1827-1903)
Edmond Dede's (Edmon' Day' day')
acllievements in music are particu­larly
noteworthy. He was a gifted vio­linist,
composer, and orchestral con-
5
Edmond Dede
Co11rt,>sy, Amistad Resrord1 Ce11ter, Louisiaua
Music Collcctio11.
ductor. His early training in music
was with Eugene Prevost, Richard
Lambert, Constantin Deburque, and
Ludovico Gabici, the director of the
St. Charles Theatre orchestra. His
father, the director of a militia band
in New Orleans, recognized his spe­cial
musical ability and sent him to
Mexico for further studies in 1848.
Subsequently, he traveled possibly to
England, then to Belgium in search of
a suitable place to pursue his musical
interests. He even tu ally arrived in
Paris where he found a hospitable en­vironment,
and entered the Paris Con­servatory
of Music in 1857. Arthur La
Co11ti1111ed on page 6
6
Composers Comer, co11ti11ued
Brew, who has done extensive re­seard1
on Dede, believes that he is
possibly the first black American to
study at the Paris Conservatory and
the first to compose an opera.
Settling in Bordeaux, France, be­tween
1860 and 1862, Dede became
the director of L'Alcazar Theater Or­chestra,
a post he held for twenty-five
years. It is reported that he became a
friend of Charles-Fran<;ois Gounod.
According to Desdunes, Dede wrote
many orchestral compositions, the
scores of which are presumably in
cities in Europe. Dede returned to
New Orleans several times during the
1890s for "farewell concerts" which in­volved
friends, including Basile
Bares, as perfo·rmers.
Dede's orchestral work Le Palmier
ouverture is said to be one of his best
compositions. Two pieces for voice
and piano, "Si j'etais lui" and "Mon
pauvre coeur," are illustrative of
Dede's natural instinct for melody. "Si
j'etais lui," written in A-Aat major, is
set to a poem by Victor-Ernest Ril­lieux.
"Mon pauvrecoeur," composed
in E minor, is particularly striking in
its somber character. His "Chicago:
Grand valse a ['americaine," a vigor­ous
and multi-sectional piece in C
minor, is representative of his mature
style.
Lucien Lambert (b. 1828)
Lucien Lambert (L66chie'(n) Lam­bar'
or Lambert) was a son of Richard
Lambert, the legendary music teacher
who inspired many students in New
Orleans. Lucien was an excellent
pianist who performed in the Theatre
D'Orleans. Desdunes has written of
a small artistic rivalry existing be­tween
Louis Moreau Gottschalk and,
presumably, Lucien Lambert. Al­though
Gottsclhalk was a better per­former,
Desdunes felt that Lambert
surpassed him as a composer. Ap­parently
displeased over the racial dis­crimination
of his day, Lucien Lam­bert
went to Paris where he continued
to study music. Later he went to Brazil
to serve as the chief musician in the
Court of Dorn Pedro. Remaining in
Brazil, he eventually entered the
piano manufacturing business.
Among Lambert's compositions is "Au
clair de la lune," an interesting theme
and variations for piano that contains
numerous arpeggiated lines.
Sidney Lambert (b. c1838)
Not much is known of the life of
Sidney Lambert, a brother of Lucien
Lambert. Writers refer to him as an
excellent pianist who served as a
musician in the court of the king of
Portugal. He was honored by the king
for his piano teaching method. He
subsequently became a teacher of
music in Paris where he lived until his
death. The "Rescue polka-mazurka,"
"Les clochettes: Fantaisie mazurka,"
and an arrangement of F. A. Rente's
"Stella, mon etoile: Celebre valse" are
among the best compositions by Sid­ney
Lambert.
Eugene Victor Macarty
(1821-1881)
Of the six composers discussed
here, Eugene V. Macarty appears to
have been the most versatile. He was
a singer, pianist, amateur actor, and
a comedian. He was also proficient as
an orator and writer of prose and
verse. On the other hand, he was a
successful businessman, who held
positions in the state government,
and was a civil rights advocate.
Macarty filed a suit against the St.
Charles Theatre in 1869 because of its
segregated seating policy. The suit
was the outgrowth of a heated con­frontation
between Macarty and the
theater manager, who requested that
he leave a section reserved for whites
at an opera performance. Macarty ac­tually
threatened the manager with
physical violence if he proceeded to
remove him. According to Desdunes,
Macarty often spoke at meetings of
the Creoles during the early days of
Reconstruction to advise them of their
civil rights.
Several writers have reported that
Macarty studied at the Paris Conser­vatory
around 1840. He had been a
piano student under a J. Norres. On
one of his published editions of pol­kas,
Fleurs de sa/011 (1854), Macarty re­fers
to himself as the "Pianist of the
fashionable Soirees of New Orleans,"
an indication that he frequently per­formed
at such social .events, The two
pieces in this collection, "La caprifolia
polka de salon" and ''I:Alzea polka
mazurka," attest to Macarty's ability
as a composer and arranger.
Samuel Snaer (c1832-c1880)
Samuel Snaer (Sniay'), the organist
for many years at St. Mary's Catholic
Church on Chartres Street in New Or-
Eugene V. Macarty
Courtesy. Amistnd Rcscnrd1 0,11/~r, Lo11isin11n
Music Collection.
leans, taught music and played sev­eral
musical instruments, including
the violin and the violoncello. He has
been described as a modest man and
a brilliant pianist. He conducted many
concerts involving choir and or­chestra.
Snaer was noted for his incredible
memory. He would often perform
with amazing accuracy pieces that he
had not seen in years. On many
occasions he would compose pieces,
send them to his friends for inspec­tion,
and never request the return of
his manuscripts. Consequently, many
of his compositions have not been re­covered.
He composed orchestral pieces,
overtures, and many waltzes, polkas,
mazurkas, and quadrilles. Because of
his experience as an organist and
choirmaster, he had a special affinity
for the voice a111d for harmony. Of his
pieces for voice and piano, "Rappelle­toi"
and "Le chant du deporte," are
truly inventive in the treatment of
melody and harmony. His "Chant
bachique" and the Mass for Three
Voices demonstrate the composer's
sensitivity to vocal writing. Although
"Magdalena Valse" is a simple piece
in C major, it is a delightful composi­tion
that sustains the interest of the
listener from beginning to end.
The Music of Basile Bares2
•t Basile'sGalop, Op. 9, for piano.
New Orleans: A. E. Blackmar,
1869.
•t La belle Creole: Quadrille des
lanciers americains, for piano.
New Orleans: A. Elie, 1866.
•tt La capricieuse: Valse, Op. 7, for
piano. New Orleans:
A. E. Blackmar, 1869. Reprinted
in Music and Some Highly Musical
People, James M. Trotter, pp.
[Appendix] 60-68. New York
Johnson. Reprint Corp., 1968.
'The locations where these compositions are
held are indicated as follows.
• Held by the Center for Black Music Re­search,
in photocopy format
t Held, most in, photocopy format, by the
Amistad Research Center, New Orleans,
Louisiana
i Held by the Tulane University Library,
New Orleans, Louisiana
§ Held by the Biblioth~que Nationale, Paris,
France
tt Lescentgardes: Valse, Op. 22,
for piano. New Orleans: [Louis
Grunewald), 1874.
t:j: La coquette: Grande polka de
salon, for piano. New Orleans:
A. Elie, 1866.
t La course: Ga lop brillante, for
piano. New Orleans:
A. E. Blackmar, 1866.
" La Creole: Polka mazurka, for
piano. New Orleans:
A. E. Blackmar, 1884.
•t La Creole: Souvenir de la
Louisiane, Marche, Op. 10, for
piano. New Orleans:
A. E. Blackmar, 1869.
•tt Delphine: Grande valse brillante,
Op. 11, for piano. New Orleans:
Louis Grunewald, 1870.
Elodia: Polka Mazurka, for piano.
n.p.,n.d.
tt Exhibition Waltz, for piano. New
Orleans: L. Grunewald, 1870.
•tt Les folies du carnaval: Grande
valse brillante, for piano. New
Orleans: A. E. Blackmar, cl867.
Les fusees musicales (by 1865).
tt Galopducarnaval, Op. 24, for
piano. New Orleans: Louis
Grunewald, 1875.
tt Grande polka des chasseurs, a
pied de la Louisiane, for piano.
New Orleans: Basile/fol ti &
Simon, 1860.
t:j: La louisianaise: Valse brillante,
for piano. New Orleans:
A. E. Blackmar, 1884.
The Magic Belles (by 1865).
•tt Mamie Waltz, Op. 27, for piano.
New Orleans: Junius Hart, 1880.
Mardi Gras Reminiscences:
Waltz, for piano. n.p., n.d.
tt Merry Fifty Lancers, Op. 21, for
piano. New Orleans: Philip
Werlein, 1873.
Minuit: Polka de salon, for piano.
n.p., n.d.
•t+ Minuit: Valse de salon, Op. 19,
for piano. New Orleans: Henry
Wehrmann, 1873.
•tt Regina: Valse, Op. 29, for piano.
New Orleans: Louis Grunewald,
1881.
•tt La seduisante: Grande valse
brillante, for piano.
n.p., c1867.
•t Les varietes du carnaval, Op. 23,
for piano. New Orleans: Louis
Grunewald, 1875.
t Les violettes: Valse, Op. 25, for
piano. New Orleans: Louis
Grunewald, 1876.
•t The Wedding: Heel and Toe
Pol.ka, Op. 26, arrangement for
piano. n.p.:J. Flanner, 1880.
The Music of Edmond Dede3
Ables, ballet. n.p., n.d.
L'Abile de la chouette: Feerie
(dramatic piece). n.p., n.d.
L'Anneau du diable: Ferrie
(dramatic piece) in three
acts. n. p., 1880.
L:Antropohage, operetta in one
act. n. p., 1880.
Apres le miel, opera comique.
n.p., 1880.
Arcadia ouverture, for orchestra.
n.p., n.d.
Une aventure de Telemaque,
opera. n.p., n.d.
Bordeaux: Grand valse.
n.p., n.d.
Les Canotiers de Lorment, ballet­divertissement.
n. p., 1880.
Caryatis, ballet-divertissement.
n.p., n.d.
Chant dramatique, for orchestra.
n.p.,n.d.
• Chicago: Grand valse a
l'americaine, for piano. Paris: E.
Froment, 1892.
Chik-King-Fo, operetta in one
act. n.p., 1878.
Diana et Acteon, ballet-divertissement.
n.p., n.d.
Ellis, ballet. n.p., n.d.
Emilie. n.p., n.d.
Les etudiants bordelais, operetta
in one act. n.p., 1883.
Les faux mandarins, ballet.
n.p.,n.d.
Le grillon du foyer, operetta.
n.p., n.d.
Mephisto masque: Polka
fantastique. n.p., n.d.
t Mon pauvre coeur, for voice.
n.p., 1852.
Nehana, reine des fees, ballet in
one act. n. p., 1862.
Le Noye, opera comique.
n.p.,n.d.
Les nymphs etchasseurs, ballet
in one act. n.p., 1880.
7
'Arthur La Brew reports that Dede's oeu,ire,:
include forty-five songs, numerous dances, fan­tasies,
six quartets for string instruments, and
other works.
Continued 011 page 8
8
Composers Comer, co11tinued
Le Palmier ouverture, for
orchest ra. n.p., n.d.
Papillon bleu: Grand valse.
n.p., n.d.
Paris: Grand valse. n.p., n.d.
Patriotisme, ballad. n.p., n.d.
La phoceenne; Grand valse.
n.p., n.d.
Quadrille. n.p., n.d.
Spa his et G-risettes, ballet·
divertissement in one act.
n.p., 1880.
La sensitive, ballet in two acts.
n.p., 1877.
Si j'etais lui, for voice. n.p., n.d.
Sultan d'lspahan, opera in four
acts. n. p., n.d.
•t "Lesermentdel'Arabe,"a
dramatic aria from Sultan
d'lspahan. Reprinted in Music
and So111e Highly Musical People,
JamesM. Trotter, pp. [Appendix]
53-59. NewYork:Johnson
Reprint Corp., 1968.
Sylvia, overture. n. p., n.d.
Symphony ("Quasimodo," by
1865).
Le triomphe de Bacchus, ballet·
d ivertissement. n.p., 1880.
Yaillant belle rose quadrille.
n.p., n.d.
The Music of Lucien Lambert
L'americaine. n.p., n.d.
•tt Au clairde la lune, Op. 30. Paris:
Emile Gallet, n.d. Reprinted in
M11sica11d Some Highly Musical
People, JamesM. Trotter, pp.
f Appendix] 69-80. New York;
Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968.
Ah, vous disais-je maman,
piano transcription. n. p., n.d.
§ Bresiliana: Fantaisie caprice
brillant, for piano. Paris
Heinz, 1869.
t§ Cloches et clochettes: Etude
mazurka brillante, Op. 31, for
piano. Paris: Colombier, 1859.
§ Le depart du conscrit: Fantaisie­marche,
Op. 32, for piano. Paris:
Colombier, 1859.
Etude-mazurka. n.p., n.d.
La flamen ca, opera in four acts.
Paris: Choudens, 1903.
La juive. n.p., n.d.
Le niagara. n. p., n.d.
t§ Ombres aimees; Reve, for piano.
Paris: Colombier, 1861. Paris,
Yienne.
Pluie de Corails. n.p., n.d.
§ La rose et le Bengali: Inspiration,
Op. 4, for piano. Paris:
L. Escudier, 1854.
The Music of Sidney Lambert
§ L'Africaine, Op. 14, transcription
for piano. Paris: Brondus, 1872.
§ Anna Bolena, de Donizetti: Petit
fantaisie, for piano. Paris: M.
Colombier, 1872.
§ LesClochettes: Fantaisie
mazurka, Op. 9. Paris: Alphonse
Leduc, 1872. Reprinted in Music
a11d Some Higlzly Musical People,
James M. Trotter, pp. [Appendix]
86-95. New York: Johnson
_ReprintCorp., 1968.
§ L'Elisire d'amore, opera de
Donizetti: Petite fantaisie, for
piano. Paris: M. Colombier, 1870.
§ __ : Fantaisie, Op. 8, for
piano. Paris: A. Leduc, 1872.
§ Murmunes du soir: Caprice,
Op. 18, for piano. Paris:
J. Hielard, 1876.
• Rescue Polka Mazurka, for piano.
Providence, R. I. : Cory Brothers,
1869.
§ Si j'etais roi, d'A. S. Adam:
Reverie, for piano. Paris:
A. Leduc, 1868.
§ La Sonnambule (Petite fantaisie
sur la), Op. 10, for piano. Paris:
A. Leduc, 1872.
t Stella mon etoile: Celebre valse.
Arrangement of the melody of
the same name composed by
F. A. Rente. New Orleans: Philip
Werlein, 1879.
§ Transport joyeux: Yalse de salon,
Op. 16, for piano. Paris.
J. Hietard, 1874.
§--·Paris:). Hielard, 1875.
The Music of Eugene V Macarty
•+t Fle11rsdesa/011: 2 Favorite Polkas
("L'Alzea: Polka mazurka" and
"La Caprifolia: Polka de salon"),
arrangement for piano. New
Orleans: n.p., 1854.
The Music of Samuel Snaer
Allegro. n.p., n.d.
Le bohemien (by 1877).
t Chant bachique, for male choir.
Manuscript.
Le chant des canotiers. n. p., n.d.
•+ Le chant du deporte, for voice.
New Orleans: Louis Grunewald,
1865.
Dormez, mescheresamours.
n.p.,n.d.
Grand scene lyrique. n. p., n.d.
Graziella Overture, for orchestra.
n.p.,n.d.
t Magdalena: Valse, for piano.
Manuscript.
Mass for Three Voices. "Gloria"
and "Agnus Dei" reprin ted in
Music and Some Highly Musical
People, James M. Trotter, pp.
[Appendix] 127-152. New York:
Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968.
+t Ra ppelle-toi, for voice. New
Orleans: Louis Grunewald, 1865.
•tt Sous sa fenetre, for voice. New
Orleans: Louis Grunewald, 1866.
Le vampire. n.p., n.d.
References
Blassingame, John W. 1973. Black New
Orleans: 1860-1880. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
Desdunes, Rodolphe L. 1973. Our
people and our Iris/on;. Translated by
Sister Dorothea Olga McCants.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Uni­versity
Press.
Edmond Dede. n.d. L'artiste
(Bordeaux, France), troisieme
annee, 2me serie, numero 30 (after
1880).
Hare, Maud Cuney. [1936] 1974. Negro
musicia11s nnd their music. New York:
Da Capo Press.
La Brew, Arthur R. 1984. Edmond
Dede (dit Charentos), 1827-1901.
Afro-American Music Review, 1, no.
2:69-83.
Rousseve, Charles B. 1937. Tlie Negro
i11 Louisiana: Aspects of //is history and
Iris literature. New Orleans: Xavier
University Press.
Southern, Ei leen. 1982. Biographical
dictionary of Afro-American and
Africa1111111sicia11s. Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press.
Southern, Eileen. 1983. Tire music of
black America11s. 2nd ed. New York:
W. W. Norton.
Trotter, James M. [1878) 1968. Music
a11d some highly musical people. The
Basic Afro-American Reprint Lib·
rary. New York: Johnson Reprint
Corporation.
Appendix
A11 011tli11e of Items That Differ
i11 the Literature
Basile Bares
1. Spelling of last name
Barres (Desdunes 1973)
Bares (All published music
scores)
2. Complete name
Sometimes listed as Bazile
Perrier
Edmond Dede
l. Spelling of first name
Edmond (Desdunes 1973;
Rousseve 1937; La Brew 1984;
L'nrtiste; published music;
Southern 1982)
Edmund (Trotter 1968; Hare
1974)
2. Date of Birth
1827 (L'artiste; Rousseve 1937;
La Brew 1984; Southern 1982)
1829 (Desdunes 1973; Trotter
1968; Hare 1974)
3. Date of Death
1901 (La Brew 1984)
1903 (Desdunes 1973; Hare 1974;
Southern 1982)
4. Spelling of teacher's name
Constantin Deburque
(Desdunes 1973; Trotter 1968;
Hare 1974; Southern 1982)
Constantin Deb-erque
(La Brew 1984)
Lucien Lambert
1. Sometimes listed as Charles
Lucien Lambert (La Brew 1984)
Sidney Lambert
1. Spelling of first name
Sidney (Trotter 1968; Hare 1974;
Desdunes 1973; Southern
1982; score of "Rescue Polka
Black Music Collections in New Orleans
by Deborrn Ridtnrdso11, Haward University
Since the Center's 1987 National Con­ference
on Black Music Research will
be held in historic and picturesque New
Orleans, this colunm wiU focus on
black-music-related research resources
at four selected New Orleans academic
institutions: Tulane University, the
Amistad Research Center, the
Louisiana State Museum, and the New
Orleans Public Library.
The Tulane University Libraries
Howard-Tuton Memorial Library
The facilities of the Tulane University
Libraries that are of most interest to
black-music scholars are those located
it1 the Howard-Tuton Memorial Library.
This library's general collections are ar­ranged
according to subject area and
housed iil open stacks. Circulation
privileges are granted to Tulane Un.iver­sity
faculty, staff, and students only,
although some exceptions to this rule
may be made. The human.ities collec­tion,
located on the second floor, con­tains
resources in art, architecture,
dance, theater, conm1u1ucations, litera­ture,
philosophy, language, and relig­ion.
Hours are from 8:30 a. 111. until 10:00
p.111., Monday through Thursday; 8:30
a.111. until 5:00 ,,.111., Friday and Satur­day;
and 1:00 p.111. until 10:00 p.111., Sun­day.
Address: 7001 Freret Street, New
Orleans, LA 70118. TeUephone: 504/865-
5605.
William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive
Located on the fourth floor of the
Howard-Tilton Memorial Library is the
Will.iam Ransom Hogan Jazz Arch.ive.
A remarkable collection of jazz ma­terials
noted for its strength in early
New Orleans jazz, it contaiils over
thirty thousand discs, eight hundred
tapes, and several cylinders. There are
also approximately fifteen hundred
reels of taped oral his tory iilterviews,
over seven thousand photographs,
sheet music of the !)"-Opular tradition,
and vertical file materials that include
memorabilia, ephemera, government
documents, and more. ln addition, the
archive boasts special holdiilgs donated
by jazz personalities, collectors, and
historians. Of these latter holdings, the
Al Rose Collection might be considered
special, contaiil.ing as it does fifteen
thousand pieces of unpublished print
and manuscript music and two
Mazurka")
Sydney (Score of "Stella mon
etoile")
Eugene Victor Macarty
1. Spelling of last name
9
Macarty (Trotter 1968; Hare 1974;
Southern 1983; D-esdunes
1973; La Brew 1984)
Macarthy (Blassingame 1973;
score to Fleurs de salon and
Bares's "La belle Creole")
McCarty (Southern 1982)
2. Full name
Victor Eugene Maca rthy
(Blassingame 1973)
3. Ma tricu La tion at the Paris
Conservatory of MUJsic
questioned (La Brew 1984)
Samuel Snaer
1. Date of birth
ca. 1832 (Southern 1982)
1834 (Trotter 1968; Hare 1974)
1835 (Desdunes 1973)
thousand discs of original jazz record­ings.
The materials in the jazz archive
are non-circulating. Hours are from
8:3011.111. to5:00 p.m., Monday through
Friday, and 10:00 a.111. tmtiJ 12:00 noon
on Saturdays. Telephone: 504/865-5688.
The Latin American Library
The Latit1 American Library's collec­tion
consists of approXllllately 150,000
books and serials, more than 3,000
maps, and over 12,000 photographs,
The library's holdings are concentrated
on the subjects of Mexico, the Carib­bean,
and Central America_ Pre-Colum­bian
art, Guatemalan culture, and Peru­vian
arclutecture are among the areas
represented in the graphic collection.
Thls library features open stacks and is
located on the fourth floor along with
other special collections, such as the
Will.iam Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive.
Hours are from 8:00 11.111. until 10:00
p.111., Monday through Thursday; 8:00
11.111. until 5:00 p.m., Friday; 10:00 a.111.
to 5:00 p.m., Saturday; and 1:00 p.111.
through 10:00 p.m., Sunday. Telephone:
504/865-5681.
Continued on page 10
10
Black Music Collections, co11ti1111ed
The Louisiana Collection
The Louisiana Collection, housed on
the second floor of the Howard-Tilton
Memorial Library, is open from 8:30
11.111. until 10:00 p.111., Monday through
Thursday, 8:3011.111. to 5:00 p.m., Friday
and Saturday, and 1:00 p.m. to 10:00
p.m. on Sunday. With resources relating
to all eras and aspects of Louisiana his­tory
and culture, it contains approxi­mately
thirty thousand books, as well
as maps, photographs, illustrations,
newspapers, vertical file materials, and
sheet music. The sheet music collection
consists of vocal and instrumental com­positions
published in the state or writ­ten
by Louisiana composers between
1830and 1920. The materials are located
in closed stacks. Photocopying services
are available. Telephone: 504/865-5643.
Maxwell Music Library
Maxwell Music Library is named
after the first chairperson of the Tulane
University Music Department and is lo­cated
on the first floor of the Howard­Tuton
Memorial Library. Supporting
the programs in music and interdiscip­linary
research in the humanities, the
library contains over 30,000 volumes of
music and scores, more than 10,000
disc recordings, approximately 160
scholarly journals, and large numbers
of audio tapes, videotapes, and mic­rofilm
documents. The stacks are open
and include resources for the study of
music history, music theory, biography,
bibliography, and performance, with
emphasis on vocal and piano literature.
Hours are from 8:0011.111. to 10:00 p.111.,
Monday through Thursday; 8:00 n.111.
to 5:00 ,,.111., Friday; 10:00 n.111. to 5:00
p.m., Saturday; and 12:00 noon to 10:00
p.111. on Sunday. Telephone: 504/865-
5642.
Library hours for alJ collections in the
Howard-Tilton Memotial Library are
subject to d1ange during intersessions
On Ragtime
and summer sessions.
The Amistad Research Center
The Amistad Research Center re­cently
relocated to Tilton Hall at Tulane
University. Formerly of Fisk University
and Dillard University, it was located
at the Old U.S. Mint in New Orleans.
Considered to be the largest research
center in the southern United States for
the documentation of black history and
culture, its collection of original 1m1te­rials
includes over 2,500 square feet of
manuscripts and historical doci1ments.
Letters, reports, diaries, photographs,
journals, and minutes of meetings that
date from the late eighteenth century
to the present can be found in the
Center's collections. Eighty-five per
cent of these holdings concern race re­lations
in the United States. Music re­sources
include a variety of materials
in the popular, jazz, and classical
idioms. Among the personal papers
housed at the Amistad are those of
Fletdier Henderson, Carol Brice, and
the Dobbs Family. The Amistad's most
recent music acquisition is the Howard
Swanson collection. Measuring about
U.4 linear feet, the papers include cor­respondence,
financial records, prog·
rams, press clippings, tape record ings,
and music manuscripts. The Amistad
Researdi Center at Tulane University is
located at Tilton Hall, 6823 St. Charles
Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70118.
Please check with the Center for its
operating schedule. Telephone: 504/
865-5535.
The Louisiana State Museum
New Orleans Jazz Club Collection
The New Orleans Jazz Club Collec­tion
of the Louisiana State Museum is
another warehouse of information. It
consists of a pennanent exhibit, approx­imately
10,000 disc recordings in 78
rpm, 45 rpm, and 33½ rpm formats;
7,000 7½ reel-to-reel tape recordings;
by Edward A. Berlin, Q11ee11sboro11gh Co1111111111ity College
"In Europe the United States is popu·
larly known better by rag-time than by
anything else it has produced in a gen­eration.
In Palis they call it American
music." So wrote James Weldon
Johnson in 1912. What had shortly be­fore
been viewed as a musical joke from
the minstrel and vaudeville stages, a
300 35 mm films; 12,000 photographs;
1,000 posters; 2,500 pieces of sheet
music; a vertical file that includes over
one thousand musicians; and other
ephemera. There are also special collec­tions
that have been donated to the
Museum. These include collections re­lated
to personalities-such as Louis
Armstrong-and geographical loca­tions-
sud, as Storyville and South
Rampart and Perdido Streets. FinalJy,
there is a small library that contains
approximately 500 books and some 100
short-run periodicals. Presently, hours
of operation are from 10:00 n.111. to 4:30
p.111. on Thursday and Friday. Please
check with the Museum for its current
operating sdiedule before visiting.
Write: Don Marquis, Curator, New Or­leans
Jazz Collection, Old U.S. Mint,
400 Esplanade Avenue, New Orleans,
LA 70116.
The New Orleans Public Library
The New Orleans Public Librarv's
main branch is located at 219 Lovola
Avenue. The system, which consists of
ten brandies, contains 900,000 volumes
of books, periodicals and audio-visual
materials. The music collections are lo­cated
in the Periodicals, Art and Recre·
ation Division. Most of the system's
music sources are scores and record­ings.
There are materials on black his­tory
throughout the collection. Hours
of operation are 10:00 n.111. to 6:00 p.111.,
Monday through Thmsday, subject to
change. Telephone 504/596-2550.
This small sample of New Orleans
libraries and archives makes it evident
that the ci ty has mud, to offer black­music
scl1olars. Other collections that
might be useful, but whid, were not
described here because of space consid­erations,
include the Historic New Or­leans
Collection at 533 Royal Street and
the library collections at the other area
universities.
primitive effort at music-making by ig­norant
blacks, a temporary aberration
of public tastes, had-in little more
than a decade-become the most d is-
tinguished art from the United States.
There was considerable opposition to
this new idiom, much of it due to the
recognition of ragtime's black origins.
Despite this opposition, ragtime was
embraced by the American public and
absorbed into its popular music, setting
that music on a new direction. Even in
today's rock, after an evolution of some
seventy years of d1anging popular
styles, the basic rhythmic gestures of
ragtime are still -detectable.
Thanks to some totally unanticipated
events in the early 1970s, ragtime is
once again before us. It has been re­vived
as a perfom1er's art and enfran­chised
as a legitimate area of scholarly
pursuit. It is therefore fitting and ap­propriate
that the BMR Newsletter
should review the current activities in­volving
this dynam.ic and seminal
music. This column will consider rag­time
broadly, will report on the ac­tivities
of researchers, perfom1ers, and
composers, and will discuss issues as
they relate to the mandate of this news­letter.
We welcome responses, provoca­tive
thoughts, news, and other con­tributions.
" . .
The long-awaited New Graue Dictio11-
ar1J of A111cric1111 Music was issued in Oc­to'ber
1986, and it deals generously with
ragtime. There are about fifty articles
on ragtime topics, at least twenty-two
of which reflect upon the black ragtime
world. These articles are: "Ragtime,"
"Scott Joplin," Louis Chauvin," "James
Scott," "Artie Matthews," "Tom Tur­pin,"
"Eubie Blake," "Willie 'The Lion'
Smith," "James P. Johnson," "Luckey
Roberts," "'Jelly Roll' Morton," "Wil­liam
H. Tyers," "Joe Jordan," "Eudav
L. Bowman," "James Reese Europe;"
"Popular Music," and ragtime-jazz sec­tions
to seven1l entries on cities
(Chicago, Cincinnati, Indianapolis,
New Orleans, New York, and St.
Louis). Entries 001 major figures in black
theater of the period, an area that fre­quently
overlaps with ragtime, include
those on Bob Cole, J. Rosamond
Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Will
Marion Cook, Paul Laurence Dunbar,
Bert Williams, and Ernest Hogan.
The Sm.ithson.ian Institution Press, as
part of a series on American compos­ers,
has two ragtime projects in the
pipeline: a Scoff Joplin Handbook and a
critical edition of the music of James
Scott. Several other projects are also
under c0nsideration.
Sedalia, Missouri was where Scott
Joplin lived when he composed the
most famous of aU rags, the Maple Leaf
Rag (1899), which gained for him the
title "The King of Ragtime Writers." In
more recent years the citizens of Sedalia
have celebrated Jopli11's memory vvith
an annual ragtime festival. Last year's
festival, in early June of 1986, was an
extraordinary musical event. It featured
such renowned jazz artists as Dick
Hyman and Jay McShann and was sup­ported
by a host of musicians who,
though lesser known, ranged in quality
from good to dazzling. Another festival
is planned for 1987. At this writing, in
November 1986, planning is stiU in its
early stages, but the schedule so far is
for a four-day festival beginning on
TI1ursday, June 4. The events will in­clude
a ragtime ball (with instructor),
at least two formal concerts, a ragtime
piano-playing contest, an ice cream so­cial,
and-as always-"after hours"
sessions that conti.Ime until whenever.
For information contact the Scott Joplin
Commemorative Committee, P.O. Box
1117, Sedalia, MO 65301.
One block west of the Maple Leaf
Club's location in Sedalia, there is a 20'
x 100' strip of land that has just been
donated to the Scott Joplin Com­memorative
Committee by Harold and
Anna Walker of Pasadena, Texas. The
Committ.?e welcomes suggestions on
how the land can be best used to honor
JopLin.
Among the citizens of Sedalia, one
finds several who have developed seri­ous
interest in Joplin and some who
have done significant work. One res­ident
intent upon preserving Sedalia's
black heritage as it relates to Scott Joplin
and hls associates is Rose Nolen. A
former president of the Scott Joplin
Committee, Ms. Nolan is a tireless re­searcher,
a friend and interviewer of
SedaUa's oldest black residents, a fre­quent
contributor of newspaper articles
on Joplin, and author of two booklets:
one on Scott Joplin (twenty pages), the
other on the George R. Smith College
(twenty-six pages), the Sedalia institu­tion
where Joplin studied music in the
1890s. Ms. Nolen has also started a
11
newsletter, The Classic Rngtimer, which,
in its first two issues, is a double-sided
legal-sized sheet. For information write
to Rose M. Nolet,, Editor, The Classic
Rngtimer, P.O. Box 125, Sedalia, MO
65301.
A Joplin project of major proportions
has been started in St. Louis under the
auspices of the Missouri Department
of Natural Resources. It is to encompass
half of a city block and have as its cen­terpiece
one of Joplins residences at
2658 Delmar Boulevard (formerly Mor­gan
Town Road). This site has been a
National Historic Landmark since 1976,
but bureaucracies dance a slow drag.
Restoration is now finally, .and fully, un­derway,
and the site is expected to open
to the public in 1988. The plan is to
return the build ing, erected in the
1860s, to its appearance of 1901, when
the composer lived there. Joplin's six­room
apartment will be fu nushed with
period pieces and illuminated with gas
lights. In other parts of the building
there will be performance areas, exhibit
gaUeries (an exhibit already planned is
on Joplin's St. Louis associates Tom Tur­pin,
Louis Chauvin, and Arthur Mar­shall),
and a visitors' center for informa­tion
and book and record sales. Out­side,
several other buildings that have
survived the demolition crews will be
redeveloped to provide a period
streetscape. Plans include eating areas
and a saloon with a piano. For further
information contact A1mette Prott, Ad­ministrator,
Scott Joplin Historic Site,
2754 Bacon Street, St. Louis, MO 63106.
Telephone: 314/533-1003.
12
Researching Black Music in New Orleans
A National Conference on Black Music Research
Shemto11 New Orlea11s Hotel, New Orleans, l..o11isia11a Octol,er 15-17, 1987
The 1987 National Conference on
Black Music Research will provide a
forum for discussion about research
tools, methodologies, and resources for
the study and investigation of the
music indigenous and particular to
New Orleans and its immediate area.
Tools for and methods of investigating
jazz, Creole, gospel, rhythm and blues,
and qdeco musics, and compositions
by late nineteenth century blacJ... com­posers
will be explored, and matters
pertaining to the research of musical
connections between New Orleans and
Chicago, lllinoi!., will be discussed.
Black musicians were active in con­cert
music from the early nineteenth
century; jazz, blues, and ragtime began
to develop there as early as the 1890l.
with the rise of Buddy Bolden; Creoles
of color have made their own music for
decades; Afro-Americans who lived in
the rural areas in the vicinity of New
Orleans performed and still perform a
hybrid music; at sometime before the
1920s a recog,nizable black religious
music began to develop; and a style of
rock and roll matured there in the
1950s. What relationships existed be­tween
the various black music genres?
Does a single black music tradition e:>.ist
in New Orleans with particular relation­ships
between the genres and with
common performance practices? What
were the cultural and social differences
among the musics and the musicians
who performed them? How does one
go about researching the various tradi­tions
with the purpose of answering
questions such as those presented
here? What are the tools for identifying,
locating, and obtaining the printed and
recorded music of all genres? What are
the tools, methodologies, and re­sources
for developing bibliographies
and discographies of the music? The
conference has been pl,mned to ad­dress
such questions as these.
Eight topics will be explored, each
paper focusing on the particular tools,
methods, and resources for researching
its subject. The abstracts that follow in­dica
te some of the matters that will be
given consideration in each of the pre­sentations.
Participants
Barry Jean Ancelet, presenter, Di­rector,
Folklore Program, University
of Southwestern Louisiana; speci.ilist
in Cajun and Creole music and
folklore; author of Tiu• Making of Cajun
Music (University of Texas Press,
1984).
Calvert Bean, Jr. , respondent, pro­gram
director for classical music,
WPLN-FM radio; associate editor of
Blnck M11sic Resenrc/1 Jo11rnnl; author of
"Retrospective: The Black Composers
Series," Black Music Rt':ii!arch Newslet­ter,
4, no. 3 (1981).
Jason Berry, respondent, author of
articles about jazz, popular music,
and culture, indud ing Amn:i11g Groce:
Witl1 Chnrh•s Evers in Mississippi (Three
Continents, 1973) and Up from //,e Cra­dle
of Jnzz: N,w Orlea11s Music Since
'Mlrld War II (University of Georgia,
1986).
Florence Borders, presenter, Direc­tor,
Chircory Society of Afro­Louisiana
History and Culture; Refer­ence
Archivist, Amistad Research
Center, New Orleans, Louisiana;
specialist in Creole music and dance.
Horace Boyer, presenter, Curator,
Division of Musical Instruments, The
Smithsonian Institution; authority on
Afro-American gospel music and au­thor
of significant articles on the sub­ject
in The Black Perspectit•e i11 Music,
Black World, and other scholarly jour­nals.
Lawrence Gushee, presenter, Pro­fessor
of Music at the University of
Illinois; author of articles on Jelly Roll
Morton and Lester Young, notes for
recordings of King Oliver, Freddie
Keppard, and Duke Ellington, and
books and articles on various aspects
of Medieval music.
Joyce Jackson, respondent, doctoral
candidate in Folklore-Ethnomusicol­ogy
at Indiana University; author of
articles on black sacred music in
Discourse i11 Etl1110111usicology II:
A Tribute lo Ala11 P. Merriam (Indiana
University Ethnomusicology Publica­tions
Group, 1981) and Snt11rday Night
and Sunday Momi11g (National Council
for the Traditional Arts and the NEA
Folk Arts Program, 1986).
Portia Maultsby, respondent,
Chairperson, Department of Afro­American
Studies, and Associate Pro­fessor
of Ethnomusicology at Indiana
University; author of the monograph
"Black American Popular Song:
Rhythm and Blues, 1945-55" (Program
in Black American Culture-Museum
of American Historv, Smithsonian In­stitution,
1986), articles on soul and
contemporary popular music in the
/011mal of Popular C11lt11re and Billbonrd,
and a forthcoming book tentatively ti­tled
Popular Music of Blnck Amaica.
Mark McKnight, presenter, As­sociate
Professor, Loyola University
Library; author of papers presented
at Music Library Association and Son­neck
Society meetings, including a
presentation on a performer of urban
.tydeco music: "My Search for Rockin'
Dopsee: Problems in Cataloging Local
Popular Sound Recordings"; guest
editor, "Music Collections in
Louisiana Libraries," Louisiana Library
Bulletin (forthcoming, summer 1988).
Kenyon Rosenberg, respondent,
Associate Director for Bibliographic
and Document Services, National
Technical Information Service, United
States Department of Commerce,
Washington, D.C.; former Associate
Director, Kent State University Li­braries.
Austin Sonnier, Jr., respondent,
professional artist, musician, poet,
and lecturer on black musics in
Louisiana; has published many works
including Willie Genry "Bimk" Joh11so11:
The New Iberia Years (Crescendo, 1977)
and articles on zydeco, blues, jazz,
and Creole music in Louisiana.
Lester Sullivan, presenter, Ar­chivist
of the Amistad Research
Center, New Orleans, Louisiana; au­thor
of articles on church history,
Afro-American genealogy, and paint­er
Jacob Lawrence; and the host of the
"Twentieth-Century Classical Show"
on radio station WTUL-FM in New Or­leans.
Richard Wang, presenter, Professor
of Music at the University of IUinois-
Chicago; President of the Jazz Insti­tute
of Chicago; author of "Jazz Circa
1945: A Confluence of Styles," Musical
Q11arterly, 59, no. 4 (October 1973),
531-546.
Ron Welburn, respondent, former
coordinator of the NEA's Jazz Oral
History Project at the Institute of Jazz
Studies, Rutgers University, and
former editor o£TlteGrackle: Improvised
M11sic i11 Transition; author of "Toward
Theory and Method with the Jazz
Oral History Project," Black Music Re­search
Journal (1986).
Abs tracts
"Tracking the Tradition: New Orleans
Sacred Music"
Horace Boyer
Until recently the missing link in
the history of black music in New Or­leans
was its quiet but significant re­ligious
music tradition. Yet, Afro­American
religious music has held a
strong position in black New Orleans
since the 1880s, influencing all black
music in that city from the brass bands
of the nineteenth century to zydeco
music of the late twentieth century.
The failure of the black religious music
of New Orleans to establish a reputa­tion
and tradition, despite its influ­ence,
presents a paradox not easily
untangled.
Black American religious music, or
the Africanization of white religious
music, made its appearance in New
Orleans as early as the 1880s. It was
during this time that the trend toward
extemporaneous performances by
brass bands was established. Some of
the music played and improvised
upon-principally through embellish­ment-
were Negro spirituals and
white Protestant hymns. At the same
time a group of black Catholics were
composing and performing religious
music, and though their influence
was small, they ultimately came to
play a significant part in the city's
music history. These included Samuel
Snaer (c1832-cl880), Edmond Dede
(1827-1903), and Basile Bares (1845-
1902). This group was augmented by
William J. Nickerson (1865-1928) in the
first quarter of the twentieth century.
During the first decade of the twen­tieth
century, religious music gained
substantial recognition through its
use both as mournful music, played
by marching bands on the way to the
grave, and as lively, swinging music
on the return from the grave. The lat­ter
was taken up and developed in a
different direction by the holiness
churches that were introduced into
New Orleans between 1900 and 1910.
This was the music that first inspired
gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. The
music of the street meetings of holi­ness
congregations and traveling
evangelists had a strong impact on the
musical preferences of the inhabi­tants,
moving their interests away
from the music of the Catholic church.
By the 1950s New Orleans was a
major gospel music city, though
it never became a gospel music ce11ter,
producing such gospel singers as Bes­sie
Griffin (b. 1927), Linda Hopkins
("Baby Helen," b. 1925), and the
queen of gospel, Mahalia Jackson
(1911-1972). None of these gospel
music figures gained fame in their
home town, partially because New
Orleans had not yet become a gospel
music center. For the first time in its
history, New Orleans is attempting to
establish itself as a gospel music
center through the diligent work of
the New Orleans Humming Four and
the Soprano Spiritual Singers, both of
whom follow the quartet tradition es­tablished
by male quartets of Alabama
and Virginia in the early 1920s.
There is, however, information on
the quiet and somewhat obscure Afro­American
religious music tradition in
New Orleans, though a circuitous
route is the only path to its discovery.
This presentation will be concerned
with the few history books, novels,
biographies, newspapers, religious
denominational histories and min­utes,
and personal ilnterviews, tools,
and methodologies for researching
gospel music in New Orleans.
"Typology of Sources for the History
of New Orleans Jazz"
Lllwrence Gushee
The two principal sources for writ­ing
the history of New Orleans jazz
have been interviews and recordings.
There are a great many other sources
that have been neglected, often be­cause
researchers are unaware of their
existence, or because they are diJficult
of access. This pa per will pass in re-
13
view some sources that have proved
useful in expanding or correcting the
historical record, with instances of the
kind of information to be gained from
them and a few caveats regarding
their use. Distinctions will be made
between their use in confirming infor­mation
gleaned from in terviews and
their power to open new windows
on the past. The sources to be discus­sed
include: photographic evidence
(snapshots, studio portraits, publicity
photos, and newsreels), newspapers
and periodicals (local New Orleans
papers, national theatrical press, gen­eral
periodicals), ephemeral advertis­ing
(handbills, business cards, etc.),
vital statistics, burial records, census
information, military records, police
and court records, licenses, published
and unpublished music, copyright re­cords,
contracts, artifacts, letters,
diaries, and address books.
"Tools and Methods for Researching
the Chicago Migration"
Richard Wang
When researching the New Or­leans-
Chicago connection, the re­searcher
of jazz music must confront
two sacred legends that bar entry to
the temple of responsible scholarship.
First, there is the legend that it was
the closing of fabled Storyville (New
Orleans's "red-light district") by the
Navy Department in 1917 that caused
a major exodus of musicians from the
city; second, that this great migration
was solely directed north along the
Mississippi River toward Chicago. In
fact, the migration of well-known
New Orleans jazzmen began as early
as 1904-1905 and continued until after
the closing of Storyville. Furthermore,
the economic impact of Storyville's
closing upon musicians has been
greatly exaggerated; they continued
to find steady employment in New
Orleans after 1917. Although the
exodus eventually included a signifi­cant
number of New Orleans's most
important musicians, many stayed be­hind
and found work. Likewise, ac­cording
to the legend, jazz came up
the Mississippi River to Chicago from
New Orleans. That may be an attrac­tive
odyssey, but it is bad geography
and worse history. The Mississippi
Co11tinued on page 14
14
National Conference, co11ti1111ed
River does not flow through Chicago;
about the closest one could get to it
on a riverboat would be Moline, Il­linois,
across the state from Chicago.
The best way to get to Chicago from
New Orleans was to go north on the
"green diamond" -the symbol ap­pearing
on the rolling stock of the Il­linois
Central Railroad.
Chicago's black-owned newspapers
played a critical role in making south­ern
blacks aware of the economic, edu­cational,
and social opportunities
awaiting them in the North. This was
especially the case during the "Great
Black Migration" of 1916 to 1920 when
approximately fifty thousand south­ern
blacks immigrated to Chicago,
creating the South-Side Black Belt so
essential to black culture in Chicago.
What can we learn about the New
Orleans-Chicago connection from
oral histories, and how reliable are
they? There are, of course, obvious
problems in attempting to obtain ac­curate
information from the testimony
of a memorist. But careful planning
and appropriate methodology can
and do elicit reliable reports.
This paper will address the ques­tion
of what happened to New Or­leans
musical traditions and styles
when they reached Chicago during
and after the migrations of the early
decades of the century. Given the fact
that the earliest known recordings of
jazz were made in New York, Los
Angeles, and, most importantly,
Chicago (and not in New Orleans),
can we extrapolate backwards from
these documents to postulate an ear­lier
or even contemporaneous New
Orleans style? What can we learn
about the New Orleans-Chicago con­nections
from the music itself? Finally,
this paper will discuss the tools,
methodology, and resources required
for the research of the modes,
methods, and relationships of the
migration of jazz musicians from New
Orleans to Chicago.
"Researching Composers of Color in
Nineteenth-Century New Orleans"
Lester S111/iva11
New Orleans introduced opera to
the United States, with the city's opera
house prompting the creation of Euro-pean
forms and styles by New Or­leans
composers. The ballroom, the
salon, the parade grounds, the
church, and a thriving local sheet
music industry all contributed to and
supported the demand. What espe­cially
distinguished the Crescent City
from similar early centers of American
musical life, however, was the pres­ence
of an unusually large black popu­lation,
the members of which were
allowed to participate in the creation
of this music. By mastering perform­ance
on European instruments and
composition in European forms and
styles, Protestant, English-speaking
Anglo-American blacks and Roman
Catholic, Frencl1-speaking Creoles of
color in New Orleans ultimately trans­mitted
European influences to the de­velopment
of jazz. Likewise, the pres­ence
of classically-trained black musi­cians
may have influenced other
Creole composers, such as Louis
Moreau Gottschalk, to incorporate Af­rican
characteristics in their music.
This paper will attempt to (1) explore
the historical background of the
unique black ethnicity of the city, (2)
identify the city's major nineteenth­century
black composers, (3) treat the
phonomenon of expatriate black New
Orleanians in Europe, (4) survey re­sources
for the study of the composers
and their work, and (5) pose some
questions about the significance of
this little-known history.
"Sources for the Study of Creole and
Cajun Music and Their Influence on
New Orleans Music"
Florence Borders
The search for sources of informa­tion
about Creole and Cajun music
begins at home and spreads abroad.
Although both Creoles and Cajuns
are French-languago:? groups that set­tled
in colonial Louisiana, they de­veloped
distinct types of music. The
Creoles preceded the Cajuns by sev­eral
decades and considered them
more in the vein of country cousins.
When the Acadians, or Cajuns, were
exiled from what is now Nova Scotia
by the British, they sought a new
homeland. They began arriving in
Louisiana between 1755 and 1765 and
settled in the southwestern part of the
state.
Black Creoles came to Louisiana as
early as other immigrant groups.
Most of them, however, came as
slaves, the first cargo !having been
shipped one year after the founding
of New Orleans in 1718. Very soon
after their arrival, they were permit­ted
to engage in Sunday recreations
in a large square where they could
sing and dance. They performed
familiar dances coupled with lyrics
that they themselves composed in
their French-based language, accom­panying
themselves on instruments
that they fashioned from materials at
hand. Survivals of these songs and
dances became known as Creole slave
songs. The contributions of these
black Creoles to the musical heritage
of Louisiana and the United States
were witnessed by nineteenth cen­tury
observers, documented by
nineteenth and twentieth century
scholars, and perpetuated by musi­cians.
The Cajuns produced rural French
folk music. Their geographic isola­tion,
combined with their desire to
protect their way of life from outside
forces, enabled them to cling to their
cultural heritage for many decades.
Eventually, the music became known
to a wider audience, influencing and
being influenced by that of other
groups, notably white English-speak­ing
people and southern blacks.
Today black Cajun music enjoys inter­national
attention, and its instrumen­tation
has broadened from the fidd le
and accordian duo to include electric
and steel guitars and drums. Lyrics
are sung in Cajun French, but may
also be sung in English, reflecting the
impact of commercialization.
Far from being isolated ethnic
groups with minuscule impact on
mainstream culture, Creole and
Cajun musicians have been major con­tributors
to the musical heritage of the
state and the nation. Bibliographies
and discographies will increase our in­formation
about these influences. Au­tobiographies
and biographies of
musicians who came from both
backgrounds will demonstrate the
truth of the adage that music speaks
a universal language. The geographic
distribution of the collections of
sources for researching Creole and
Cajun music will indicate the impor­tance
of the music in the total spec-
trum of our cultural heritage.
"Zarico: [Zydeco) Beans, Blues, and
.Beyond"
Barry Jean Ancelet
Like the blues, rock, jazz, and reg­gae,
zarico is the result of a blend of
European (primarily French) and
Afro-Caribbean music traditions.
South Louisiana folk etymology ex­plains
that the word comes from the
line "Les haricots sont pas sales" (The
beans aren't salty), used in many of
the tradition's songs; but a look at
Creole traditio11s and the languages
of Africa's west coast shows zarico in­volves
more than beans. In the earliest
Alan Lomax recordings (1934) as well
as in contemp-Orary music, "zarico"
functions like "blues'' in American
English, referring to hard times and
the music that eased the pain of hard
times. Zarico also has a sexual con110-
tation related to its likely origins in
African fertility ritual music and
dance. It has a broad social applica­tion,
referring to dances and dancers,
as well as music and musicians.
"Researching New Orleans Rhythm
and Blues: Identifying the Sources"
Mark McK11ight
Although New Orleans is most
often defined as the birthplace of jazz,
it is a city whose musical heritage is
as rich and varied as its justly famous
cuisine. It is the very complexity of
New Orleans's musical life, both past
and present, that has interested music
researchers in exploring the city's cul­tural
and musical roots. Whereas most
serious musical scholarshjp concern­ing
New Orleans music has in the past
Introducing . . .
focused on early jazz, a few studies
in the last decade have concentrated
on the area's non-jazz musical culture,
principally, rhythm and blues.
While New Orleans's influence on
post-World War II popular music is
often overlooked by popular music
scholars, even a cursory examination
of the musicians who flourished in
New Orleans in the twenty years be­tween
World War II and the British
invasion of the rn.id-1960s confirms
the importance of New Orleans
rhythm and blues in the rock-and-roll
revolution.
For the serious researcher, attempts
at finding sources of information on
post-war music in New Orleans, espe­cially
that of lesser known musicians,
can be frustrating. Some of these prob­lems
stem from the fact that those in­terested
in this field have not always
possessed the necessary research
skills. As a result, many of the tools
currently available are less than ideal.
This paper will focus on resources a­vailable
to researchers, both tradi­tional
and non-traditional kinds of
sources, and lacunae in existing mate­ria
ls. The paper wiil also shed light
on potential new areas of investiga­tion
for popular music scholars.
"The CBMR Database and the CBMR
Bulletin Board"
CBMR Staff
The CBMR Database consists of
two complimentary parts. The U11ion
Catalog of Black Music Materials i11
Selected Chicago-Arca Libraries is de­signed
for the purpose of providing
local and visiting scholars with a re­source
for ascertai11ing what materials
Members of the National Advisory Board of
The Center for Black Music Research
by Bruce T11cker, New Brunswick, Nl'lv Jersey
National Advisory Board member
Or. Clifton H. Johnson sees a clear
connection between the Amistad Re­search
Center, of which he is execu­tive
director, and the work of the
Center for Black Music Research.
"Just as the Amistad Center did, the
Center for Black Music Research is en-tering
a field that has not been
explored," he says. "I see the Center
as making the whole area more visible
and promoting resea·rch in the field."
Founded by Dr. Johnson in 1969
and supported, in part, by the Ameri­can
Missionary Association, the Arrus­tad
Research Center, located in New
15
pertinent to a particular black music
topic are held in which of the selected
Chlcago-area Libraries. The establish­ment
of the Union Catalog will facili­tate
and stimulate research in black
music, providing scholars with easy
access to Hsts of materials pertinent
to various topics of interest. The Refer­ence
System is designed to provide
scholars with an unprecedented level
of extensive and detailed access to
sound recordings, sheet music, music
manuscripts, and vertical file mate­rials.
The CBMR Bulletin Board is a
forum for individuals interested in
black music research. It is useful to
scholars and musicians who fre­quently
or occasionally need: 1) infor­mation
about out-of-print books,
printed music, recordings, films, and
videotapes; 2) information about cur­rent
research activity; 3) bibliographi­cal
and discographical information; 4)
name/subject authority information
relating to black musicia.ns and black
music research; 5) computer programs
useful to scholars; 6) and other infor­mation
pertinent to research and writ­ing.
The usefulness to scholars of the
CBMR Database, with its Union
Catalog and Reference System, and
the CBMR Bulletin Board will be de­monstrated
through searches and re­trievals
on microcomputers.
For information about attending the
Conference, write to: National Confer­ence
on Black Music Research, Center
for Black Music Research, Columbia
College, 600 South Michigan Avenue,
Chicago, IL 60605-1996.
Orleans, collects original source mate­rial
for the study of America's ethnk
minorities, with a primary emphasis
on Afro-Americans. The center holds
more than eight million items, the
largest such repository in the world.
Continued 011 page 16
16
Johnson, continued
Dr. Clifton H. Johnson
The core of its archives includes the
approximately three thousand docu­ments
relating to the Amistad incident,
the celebrated abolitionist issue out of
which the American Missionary As­sociation
evolved. In 1839 two
Spanish slaveowners, having pur­chased
in Havana fifty-three Africans
brought there illegally, booked pas­sage
on the merchant ship Amis/ad.
While the ship was becalmed in
Havana harbor, the Africans seized
control of the ship and forced the
Spaniards to sail toward the rising
sun. But at night the Spaniards
steered the ship northward, until they
"The question," says board member
Dempsey J. Travis, president of his
own realty and insurance companies
since 1949 and recently the author of
several pioneering studies of black cul­ture,
"is not how did I get involved
in black history and black music, but
how did I get involved in business."
His three books- An A11tobiography
of Black Chicago (Urban Research Insti­tute,
1981 ), An A11tobiogrnphy of Black
Jazz (Urban Research Institute, 1983),
and A11 Autobiogrnplzy of Black Politics
(Urban Research Institute, 1986)-all
grew out of experiences and interests
that long preda.ted his successful bus­iness
career.
"My father came to Chicago in 1900
and his brother a little earlier," says
arrived in Long Island Sound, where
the ship was intercepted by the U.S.
Navy. Abolitionists, ,coming to the aid
of the Africans, carried the fight all
the way to the U.S. Supreme Court,
which eventually allowed the Afri­cans
to return to Africa.
In addition to the Amistad papers
and materials relating to the American
Missionary Association and the in­stitutions
it founded, the center has
in its vast collection some notable
musical material, including the pa­pers
of composer Howard Swanson.
The center has also been designated
as the repository for the papers of
Hale Smith and Roger Dickerson. Two
of the Center's oral history collections
also focus on music-one of New Or­leans
jazz musicians and one of
Chicago jazz musicians.
"The center was originally found­ed,"
says Dr. Johnso;n, "because of the
neglect of Afro-American history."
In fact, he says, he was shamed into
it.
"In 1950 I went to teach at
LeMoyne, a black college in Mem­phis,"
he says. "Though I had a mas­ters
degree in American history from
the University of Chicago and had
comleted my residency for my doc­torate
at the University of North
Carolina, I knew nothing about black
history. It just absolutely embarrassed
me when my students would bring
up names and incidents that I knew
nothing about. So I began to educate
myself in black history. From there, I
Travis. "They used to tell me what
Chicago was like. I was fascinated
with all these stories about the city.
Then, as a young man, I became dis­appointed
because I couldn't read
about any of this anywhere."
To remedy that, Travis interviewed
more than two hundred people, most
of them more than eighty years of age,
and researd1ed thousands of news­paper
articles and books to produce
his story of black Chicago, from the
arrival of Jean Baptiste DuSable in
1779 up to 1981.
"l broadened it, obviously," he
says, "but the book. is a reaffirmation
of the information I'd gotten from my
father and uncle."
The elder Travis, in addition to tell-realized
that it was important that
something be done to make the re­sources
available for the study of black
history. And that's how the Amistad
Research Center began."
Dr. Johnson has also taught at East
Carolina College, the University of
New Orleans, and Dillard University.
From 1966 to 1969, while at Fisk Uni­versity,
he served as dil'ector of the
American Missionary Association's
Race Relations Department. He has
been a consultant to the United States
Department of Education and has
served on boards and on committees
for numerous organizations including
the United Nations Association of
Memphis, the Tennessee Council of
Human Relations, the National Com­mittee
Against Discrimination in
Housing, the Center for the Study of
Southern Culture, the Louisiana Arts
Council, and the Louisiana Folklore
Commission.
His numerous scholarly publica­tions
focus primarily on Afro-Ameri­can
history, with an emphasis on the
antebellum period and the aboli­tionist
movement. He edited God
Struck Me Dead: Religious Conversion
Experiences and the Autobiographies of
Ex-Slaves (Pilgrim Press, 1969), an oral
history collection.
The study of black music, he says,
is central to black history: "Afro­American
music .is certainly a major
expression of Afro-American culture
and one of the original contributions
to American history and music."
ing stories, played blues piano at rent
parties and in clubs around Chicago
in the twenties. Unable to read music,
he sent his son to music school at age
five. By age thirteen, young Dempsey
was performing professionally in
clubs around the city, playing piano
in a style influenced by Earl Hines.
By age six teen, he was fronting his
own big band-Jack Travis and His
Orchestra. The high point came at the
Savoy Ballroom in 1938 in a mammoth
battle of the bands, including those
of Fletcher Henderson, Lil A rm­strong,
and more than twenty other
prominent groups of the day.
In the Army during World War IJ,
he formed jazz bands that played for
USO dances. He was also shot in a
race riot at an army base in Shenango,
Pennsylvania, in 1943. After the war
he studied music at Roosevelt Univer­si
ty and was graduated in 1949. Big
bands had fallen on hard times, so he
chose a ca reer in business instead. "l
wanted to eat regularly," he says.
Nevertheless, his friendships with
hundreds of jazz musicians and the
absence of books by blacks on black
music led him to write An Autobiog­raphy
of Black Jazz, modeled on the ear­lier
book about Chicago. Both books,
published by his own press, Urban
Research Institute Publishing Com­pany,
quickly established themselves
on the bestselier list in the Chicago
area and stayed there for months.
His book on black politics grew out
of his long-standing friendship with
Chicago mayor Harold Washington.
Originally, Travis in tended to produce
a biography of the mayor, but he SOM
expanded it, in the manner of his pre­vious
books, to encompass the entire
For thirty years board member
Martin Williams has been among the
foremost critics and researchers of
American art and culture. He has de­voted
much of his professional life to
an evaluation of that culture.
Martin Williams
"We have produced some of the
best and most influential artists of the
century," he says, "and have evolved
our own highEy influential genres of
art: jazz and its associa ted dance,
musical theate1·, the movies, the comic
history of black politics in the area.
The book, based on interviews with
nearly four hundred people and on
more than fifteen thousand news­paper
articles and two hundred
books, took three and a half years to
complete.
In addition to his writing, publish­ing,
and business activities, Travis has
served as a trustee for Northwestern
Memorial Hospital, Garrett Evangeli­cal
Theological Seminary, the Na­tional
Housing Conference, and the
Chicago Historical Society; as director
of the Museum of Broadcast Com­munications;
and as a member of the
board of directors of UnibancTrust
Company, Unibanc Inc., and the
Chicago World's Fair 1992 Authority.
He has participated in five Chicago
television documentaries, all nomi­nated
for local Emmy awards.
Of the Center for Black Music Re­search,
he says, "I think it's a god­send.
Had there been such a center
strip, and our variants of traditional
literary forms ."
Probably best known for his work
in jazz, he has produced journalism,
reviews, and scholarly research in
dozens of publications both here and
abroad. He has published five books
on jazz including the biographical­critical
study Jazz Masters of New Or­lea11s
(Macmillan, 1967) and the well­received
critical and theoretical work
The Jazz Tmditio11 (Oxford, 1983). In ad­dition,
he is the author of Where's t/ze
Melody? A Liste11cr's Introd11ction to Jazz
(Pantheon Books, 1966), Jazz Masters
in Tra11sition, 1957-1969 (Macmillan,
1970), and Jazz Heritage, (Oxford,
1985). He edited The Art of Jazz (Ox­ford,
1959) and Jazz Panorama
(Crowell-Collier, 1962) and was gen­eral
editor of the Macmillan "Jazz
Masters" series.
Composer and conductor Gunther
Schuller called The Jazz Trad it ion "a bril­liant
and concise summation of the
major developments and figures in
jazz." In 1973 the book was awarded
an ASCAP-Deems Taylor award for ex­cellence
in music criticism. Of the in­troductory
Where's the Melody?, The
New Yorker wrote that it "makes a dif­ficult
subject seem difficult, and abso­lutely
understandable." Dan Morgen-
17
Dempsey J. Travis
when I was pulling my material on
jazz together, the book would have
been more comprehensive, and l
wouldn't have had to sweat quite so
hard."
stern, Director of the Rutgers Univer­sity
Institute of Jazz Studies, has
said that Will iams is "the most
distinguished critic America has
produced."
Williams has also contributed past
and current entries on jazz to several
standard reference volumes, includ­ing
Britm111ica, the l11ternatio11al Cy­clopedia
of Mu,.ic mid Musicians, Amcr­icm1a,
Book of K11owledge, Tlze New Grove
Dictionary of Music and M11sicia11s,
Jcfferso11, and Collier's E11cyc/opedia
Yearbook. He founded and edited,
with Nat Hentoff, the Jmz Review.
From 1971 to 1981 he served as Di­rector
of the Jazz and American Cul­ture
Programs at the Smithsonian In­stitution.
Since 1982 he has been
Editor, Special Projects, at the Smith­sonian
Institu tion Press. He selected
and annotated the record anthology
The S111ithso11ia11 Collect ion of Classic
Jazz, and he has taught courses in jazz
history at numerous institu tions.
Williams has also pursued other as­pects
of the culture of the United
States. He has written on film, the
musical stage, theater, children's liter­ature,
the comic strip, and television.
And he has collated and produced ar-
Continued on page 18
18
Williams, co11ti1111ed
chival American Musical Theater re­cordings
for the Smithsonian.
Film historian William K. Everson
called Williams's study D. W Griffith:
First Artis/ of 1/ze Movies (Oxford Uni­versity
Press, 1980) "an ideal introduc­tion
to all the other books on Griffith
and the films themselves."
With Bill Blackbeard, he co-edited
and co-annotated Tlzc S111if/1so11ia11 Col­lectio11
of Nt•wspaper Co111ics (Smithso­nian
Institution Press, 1977), called by
the New York Times "a book every social
philosopher will want to ponder."
With Mike Barrier, he edited A Smitlz­so11in11
Book of Co111ic Book Co111ics. His
latest book is TV: Tlze Casual Art. (Ox­ford,
1982).
News and Notes From
Williams's work on American chil­dren's
literature has included con­tributions
to the scholarly periodical
Clzildre11'$ Litemt11rc! :ind to Tlte Penguin
Companio11 to Children's Literature. He
has lectured widely on jazz, film, and
children's literatu re; he has conducted
institutes in criticism for the Music
Critics Association; and in 1978 he
was awarded a Guggenheim Fellow­ship.
Rather than pursue his subjects
only from the perspective of a scholar
or critic, Williams has actively worked
in several of the fields about which he
has written. He has worked in radio
and television on both sides of the
microphone and camera, and he has
been an actor on stage and in film.
He helped write Mort Sahl's Broad-
The Center for Black Music Research
/Jy Joseplzi11e Wriglzt, Tlze College of Wooster
Pianist Adullah Ibrahim appeared
in concert in Boston, Massachusetts,
for the first time during the summer
of 1986. Of the handful of jazz artists
from Africa known in the West,
fbrahim has built a solid reputation in
the jazz community with a career that
spans twenty years and almost thirty
albums. AnativeofCapeTown,South
Africa, he left his homeland in 1962,
after he was denied access to medical
school because of mixed racial parent­age.
He settled briefly in Zurich,
Switzerland, where he was discov­ered
by Duke Ell ington, who offered
him his first recording contract.
Ibrahim made his debut in the United
States in 1965 at the Newport Jazz Fes­tival.
He has since participated in
numerous benefit concerts for the
African National Congress and the
Southwest African Peoples Organiza­tion,
which support the liberation
struggle of black South Africans.
The American Society of Univer­sity
Composers will hold its twenty­second
annual conference at North­western
University April 8-12, 1987.
For complete details write: Stephen
L. Syverud, Northwestern University,
School of Music, 711 Elgin Road,
Evanston, IL 60201.
The Center for Black Music Re­search,
the College Music Society,
and the American Musicological Soc­iety
will hold their combined 1987 an­nual
meetings in New Orleans Oc­tober
15-18. For further details about
the CBMR Conference, see the related
article earlier in this issue.
Conductor Charles Darden di­rected
a band concert for the final per­formance
of the Washington Square
Festival in Greenwich Village, New
York City, in August, 1986. The prog­ram
included music by Handel,
Schubert, and Sousa.
Composer Anthony Davis has writ­ten
a new three-act opera entitled X
(The Life a11d Times of Mnlco/111 X), which
received its world premiere by the
City Opera at Lincoln Center in New
York on September 28, 1986 (Chris­topher
Keene, conductor; Ben Holt,
title role). The story was by the com­poser's
younger brother, Christopher
Davis, and the libretto was by poet
Thulani Davis, a second cousin. The
opera is a synthesis of contemporary
avant-garde classical music styles and
"Third Stream" music. Two extended
reviews of the opera appeared in the
New York Times on September 28 and
way review, Tlze Next President; he
wrote a Smithsonian puppet play; and
he has researched television doc­umenh'tries
for CBS.
Williams sees American art at its
best as often definitive expressions of
the twentieth century, and as all but
irresistable forces in the modern
world.
"After all," he says, "we live in a
country which in recent memory has
produced William Faulkner and
Dashiell Hammett; Martha Graham
and Fred Astaire; Eugene O'Neill and
John Ford; Frank Lloyd Wright and
Walt Kelly; Charles Ives and Duke El­lington;
'Leontyne Price and Sarah
Vaughan. And it is possible, by the
way, that de Tocqueville would not
have understood any of them."
October 5, 1986, and an article by An­drew
Porter was published in the Oc­tober
27 issue of The New Yorker.
William Ferris, director of the
Center for the Study of Southern Cul­tu
re (University of Mississippi), an­nounces
a 1987 NEH Summer Semi­nar
for College Teachers at his institu­tion,
focusing on the theme "Blues as
History, Literature, and Culture."The
seminar, which is scheduled for June
15 through August 7, 1987, will be in­terdisciplinary
in scope. Applications
are encouraged from tead1ers oi
music as well as instructors of Ameri­can
and Afro-American Studies. All
inquiries should be addi:essed to Wil­liam
Ferris, Center for the Study of
Southern Culture, University of Mis­sissippi,
University, MS 38677.
MCA Records has begun remaster­ing
and reissuing classic blues,
R & B, and jazz LPs from the catalog
of Chess records, which featured
"race records" and "soul" during the
1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Singer How­lin'
Wolf is the focus of the first dozen
reissues.
Portia Maultsby, of the University
of Indiana-Bloomington, delivered a
paper at the 1986 annual meeting of
the College Music Society. The
November 12, 1986, issue of The
Chro11icle of Higher Ed11calio11 contained
a review of her paper, which discuss­ed
the role of the black church as an
important influence upon popular
music traditions of Afro-Americans.
Maultsby cred ited the performance
style and oratory of black preachers
with laying "the structural and
aesthetic components for music
making in black America."
The Moorland-Spingam Research
Center of Howard University has
been recognized by its parent institu­tion
as the Outstanding Service Unit
in Academic Affairs for 1985-1986. The
selection was made by a special com­mittee
of Howard University faculty
appointed by President James Cheek.
The Moorland-Spingarn Research
Center is compi·ised of several depart­ments:
a Library Division, Manuscript
Division (of which the Music Depart­ment
is a unit), a Support Division,
the Howard University Archives, and
the Howard University Museum. Its
holdings, which date from the
eighteenth century through the pres­ent
day, comprise over 100,000 books,
6,000 linear feet of manuscript mate­rials,
850 oral histories, 4,000 pieces
of sheet music, 7,000 recordings, and
50,000 photographs. (For a more com­plete
description of the Music Depart­ment
and its holdings, see BMR News­letter
8, no. 1:7+.)
Several topical notes pertaining to
the city of New Orleans tha t might be
of interest to readers have come across
the desk of this colLtmnist. Street per­formers
in the French Quarter of the
Crescent City have recently protested
a proposed city ordinance that they
be licensed. The proposal would re­quire
that all performers-musicians,
downs, mimes, jugglers, and dan­cers-
buy a license for $100 each year.
The city already has a ban in effect
against musicians playing music that
can be heard more than twenty-five
feet away.
Visi tors to New Orleans who wish
to hear live performances of blues,
R & B, and jazz by local and out-of­town
musicians will certainly want to
explore some of the dubs listed here:
Tipitina's located at 501 Napolean Av-enue;
the Maple Leaf Bar, 8316 Oak;
Dorothy's Medallion, 3232 Orleans
Avenue; the New Storyville Jazz Hall,
1104 Decatur; and Tyler's Beer Gar­dens,
5234 Magazine. Additional
listings of clubs and perfom,ances
may be obtained by consulting
Wavele11gth, a magazine devoted to
musical activities in New Orleans
(available by writing 1Nm,elc11gth, P.O.
Box 15667, New Orleans, LA 70175),
and the Jolly Jazz Cale11dar, compiled
by Pat Jolly of the New Orleans Jazz
& Heritage Foundation (1205 N. Ram­part
Street, New Orleans, LA 70116).
The Louis Armstrong Park in New
Orleans has presented performances
of festive brass bands for the last two
years during autumn. The Louisiana
Jazz Federation has declared October
as Jazz Awareness Month. This or­ganization
promotes a variety of pub­lic
programs for media as well as live
performances. A schedule of its
events may be obtai11ed by writing di­rectly
to the federation, P.O. Box 7U4,
New Orleans, LA 70186, or by calling
504/242-2323.
Karl Koenig ("Dr.K.") advises that
he has a forthcoming book entitled A
Jazz Walki11gTourof tire Fre11c/1 Quarter.
Jason Berry, Jonathan Foose, and
Thad Jones have written a new jazz
history book called Up from the Cradle
of Jazz: New Orleans Music Si11ce World
War 11, published by the University of
Georgia Press. The book chronicles
black music in the Crescent City from
Professor Longhair and Fats Domino
through Wynton and Bradford Mar­salis.
Roman Catholic Church officials
have announced plans for a new hym­nal,
entitled Lead Me, Guide Mc, which
is aimed at making worship services
and music more meaningful to black
parishioners. The hymnal will be an
anthology compiled from several
sources, including Protestant publica­tions
used by predominantly black
congregations, Negro spirituals,
popular gospel and revival hymns,
traditional Roman Catholic hymns
and chants, original compositions by
Afro-American writers, as well as
songs of African and Caribbean ori­gin.
The project was initiated in 1983
by Auxiliary Bishop James P. Lyke (of
19
Cleveland), who asked black clergy,
educators, and laity for suggestions
of songs to be included in the compi­lation.
A new film, Round Midnight, dedi­cated
to jazzmen Bud Powell and
Lester Young, has been recently re­leased
by Warner Brothers. The film
features Dexter Gordon, Franc;ois
Cluzet, Sandra-Reaves Phillips,
Lonette McKee, and Herbie Hancock
(music composed and directed by
Hancock).
Jazz pianist Teddy Wilson died in
August, 1986, at the age of 73. Wilson,
who spent much of his career as a
soloist and leader of his own small
combos, first came to international at­tention
as a performer with the Benny
Goodman trio and orchestra during
the 1930s. In his later years Wilson
resided in Connecticut, where he per­formed
regularly with his two sons,
Theodore and Steve Wilson. Another
notable passing was that of jazz
trumpeter Thad Jones, who died in
Copenhagen, Denmark, also in Au­gust
of 1986. Jones will be remem­bered
for his arrangements for the
poll-winning band that was regularly
featured on Monday nights at the Vil­lage
Vanguard in New York City from
1965 to 1978. A prolific composer, a
few of his notable compositions in­clude
"Mean What You Say," "Con­summation,"
"Fingers," and "Little
Pixie."
The Underground Railroad Theatre
marked its tenth anniversary in June,
1986, Now based in Cambridge, Mas­sachusetts,
the company was origi­nally
founded in Oberlin, Ohio (an
actual station along the historic
Underground Railroad), and was
brought to New England in 1979 by
its cofounders, Wes Sanders and
Debra Wise. The current production
of the company is a work called
Sanctuary: The Spirit of Harriet T11b111n11,
which is now touring the northeast­ern
and southeastern states. Musical
selections from the production in­clude
Negro spirituals, Latin folk
tunes, and a song composed by Walter
Robinson, entitled "Life[ine," which
memorializes Tubman. Information
Conti11ued on page 20
20
News and Notes, continued
about the group may be obtained by
calling 617/497-6136.
Composer Walter Robinson, of
Cambridge, was the subject of a half­hour
PBS program called Soundings,
produced by WGBH-TV (Boston) and
aired in July of 1986. Robinson has
recently completed a two-hour opera
entitled Look What a Wonder Jesus Has
Done, which is based on the subject
of antislavery activist Denmark Vesey
and the abortive slave rebellion in
Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822.
The opera fuses elements of gospel
music, jazz, and classic symphonic
styles. The world premiere of the
work is planned for Boston in 1987.
Composer Delores White, of
BMR Newsletter is devoted to the encourage­ment
and promotion of scholarship and cultural
activity in black American music and is in­tended
to serve as a medium for the sharing
of ideas and information regarding current and
future research and :activities in universities and
research centers.
Editor: Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.
Managing Associate Editor: Marsha J. Reisser
Cuyahoga Community College­Cleveland,
won second prize in the
Ithaca College Chora I Competition for
her setting of the poem "Mollie and
Maggie and Millie and Me" by e. e.
cummings. She was selected as the
recipient of the prize from among two
hundred nation-wide competitors.
The College Music Society now has
available the contents of the plenary
session Fact and Value in Contemporary
Musical Scholarship which was held in
Vancouver, British Columbia, on
November 8, 1985. Reflecting the dif­ferent
disciplinary agendas and
points of view of the American
Musicological Society, the College
Music Society, the Society for
Ethnomusicology, and the Society for
Music Theory, the booklet contains
the addresses given by the four pres-
BMR Newsletter is published by the Colum­bia
College Center for Black Music Research.
Information submitted for inclusion should be
mailed to: Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., Editor, Center
for Black Music Research, Columbia College,
600 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois
60605-1996.
Associate Editors: Calvert Bean, Jr., Orin Moe
Production Manager: Gerry Gall
idents and the respondents at theses­sion.
To obtain a copy, send a check
or money order for $5.00 to The Col­lege
Music Society, 1444 Fifteenth
Street, Boulder, CO 80302.
Lester Sullivan, archivist at the
Amistad Research Center, New Or­leans,
Louisiana, hosts a weekly
"Twentieth•Century Classical Show"
on WTUL-FM in New Orleans. He
welcomes the loan or donation of tape
recordings from composers who
would like to have their works aired.
He would also appreciate any inform­ative
comments, either taped or
written, concerning the composi­tions.
Mr. Sullivan may be contacted
at the Amistad Research Center,
Tulane University, 6823 St. Charles
Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70118. Tele­phone:
504/865-5535.
Inquiries regarding subscription, as weU as
subscription payments of $2.00 per volume,
should be sent to:
Publications, Center for Black Music Research
Columbia College Chicago
600 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, JIJinois 60605-1996
Designer: Mary Johnson
Typesetter: Anita Strejc
..
Updated Music List
Six Composers of Nineteenth-Century New Orleans
BMR Newsletter, Vol. 9, No. 1
The following List consists of all of the
works given in the music lists for "Com­posers
Comer" :in BMR Newsletter, Vol.
9, No. I with the addition of many more
works by Edmond Dede, Lucien
Lambert, and Sidney Lambert which are
held in the Biblioteque Nationale in
Paris. In some cases this additional
information provides publication
information for works listed in the "Com­posers
Comer" article. As in the former
list, the locations where the compositions
are held are indicated as follows.
* Held by the Center for Black Music
Research, in photocopy format
t Held, most in photocopy format, by
the Amistad Reseaich Center, New
Orleans, Louisiana
t Held by the Tulane University
Library, New Orleans, Louisiana
§ Held by the Biblioteque Nationale,
Paris, France
The Music of Basile Bares
*t Basile's Galop, Op. 9, for piano.
New Orleans: A. E. Blackmar, 1869.
*t La belle Creole: Quadrille des
lanciers americains, for piano. New
Orleans, A. Elie, 1866.
*H La capricieuse: Valse, Op. 7, for
piano. New Orleans: A. E. Blackmar,
1869. Reprinted in Music and Some
Highly Musical People, James M.
Trotter, pp. [Appendix] 60-68. New
York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1\168.
t:t Les cent gardes: Valse, Op. 22, for
piano. New Orleans: [Louis
Grunewald], 1874.
ft La coquette: Grande polka de salon,
for piano. New Orleans: A. Elie,
1866.
t La course: Galop brillante, for piano.
New Orleans: A. E. Blackmar, 1866.
* La Creole: Polka mazurka, for piano.
New Orleans: A. E. Blackmar, 1884.
*t La Creole: Souvenir de la Louisiane,
Marche, Op. 10, for piano. New
Orleans: A. E. Blackmar, 1869.
*t+ Delphine: Grande valse brillante, Op.
11, for piano. New Orleans: Louis
Grunewald, 1870.
Elodia: Polka Mazurka, for piano.
n.p., n.d.
H Exhibition Waltz, for piano. New
Orleans: L. Grunewald, 1870.
*H Les folies du carnaval: Grande valse
brillante, for piano. New Orleans:
A. E. Blackmar, cl 867.
Les fus~s musicales (by 1865). n.p.,
n.d.
t+ Galop du carnaval, Op. 24, for piano.
New Orleans: Louis Grunewald,
1875.
H Grande polka des chasseurs, a pied
de la Louisiane, for piano. New
Orleans: Basile/fol ti & Simon, 1860.
*H Regina: Valse, Op. 29, for piano.
New Orleans: Louis Grunewald,
1881.
*t+ La s~duisante: Grande valse bril­lante,
for piano. n.p., c1867.
*+ Les varietes du carnaval, Op. 23, for
piano. New Orleans: Louis
Grunewald, 1875.
t Les violettes: Valse, Op. 25, for
piano. New Orleans: Louis
Grunewald, 1876.
*t The Wedding: Heel and Toe Polka,
Op. 26, arrangement for piano. n.p.:
J. Flanner, 1880.
The Music of Edmond Dede
Ables, ballet n.p., n.d.
L' Abile de la chouette: Feerie (dra­matic
piece). n.p., n.d.
§ Les Adieux du coursier: Chant
dramatique oriental, for voice. Paris:
E. Fromont, 1888.
tt La louisianaise: Valse brillante, for §
piano. New Orleans: A. E. Blackmar,
1884.
L'Amour! c'est-y bon? Bordeaux,
France: E. Philibert, 1877.
L' Anneau du diable: Feerie (dra­matic
piece) in three acts. n.p., 1880.
The Magic Belles (by 1865). n.p.,
n.d.
*H Mamie Waltz, Op. 27, for piano.
New Orleans: Junius Hart, 1880.
Mardi Gras Reminiscences: Waltz,
for piano. n.p., n.d.
tt Merry Fifty Lancers, Op. 21, for
piano. New Orleans: Philip Werlein, §
1873.
Minuit: Polka de salon, for piano.
n.p., n.d. §
*H Minuit: Valse de salon, Op. 19, for
piano. New Orleans: Henry
Wehrmann, 1873.
L' Antropohage, operetta in one act.
n.p., 1880.
Apres le miel, opera comique. n.p.,
1880.
Arcadia ouverture, for orchestra. n.p.,
n.d.
Battez aux Champs: Cantate dediee a L. M. l'Empereur Napoleon IIl.
Manuscript, 1865.
Bikina: Conseil hygienique.
Bordeaux: Emile Marchand, 1881.
Bordeaux: Grnnd valse. n.p., n.d.
Les Canotiers de Lorment, ballet­divertissement.
n.p., 1880.
2
Caryatis, ballet-divertissement. n.p.,
n.d.
§ C'est la fautc a Colas, for voice.
Paris: L. Couderc, 188 I.
Chant dramat.ique, for orchestra. n.p.,
n.d.
* § Chicago: Grand valse a I' arnericaine,
for piano. Paris: E. Fromont, 1892.
§ Chicago: Grande Valse a l'amfai­caine,
for orchestra. Paris: E.
Fromont, 1891.
Chile-King-Fe, operetta in one act
n.p., 1878.
§ Comme une socur, for voice. Paris:
§
§
§
§
§
F. Guillemain, I 887.
La Conspiration des amoureu,c:
D'apr~s le Pronunciarnento Marche
espagnole, for voice. Paris: BathlOL
et Heraud, 1887.
Cora la Bordelaise, for voice.
Bordeaux: E. Philibert, 1881.
Cora la Bordelaise, for voice. 2nd
edition. Paris: Vve Gheluve, 1881.
En Chasse: Mazurka elegante, for
orchestra, by Eugene Dede. Edited
by Edmond Dede. Paris: n.p., 1891.
Diana et Acteon, ballet-divertisse­ment.
n.p., n.d.
Ellis, ballet n.p., n.d.
Emilie. n.p., n.d.
L'Ermitage ou !'hospice de Sl.
Vincent de Paul a Pouy pres Dax
(Landes): Romance religieuse, for
voice. Bordeaux: E. Philibert, 1855.
Les etudiants bordclais, operetta in
one acl. n.p., 1883.
Les fau,c mandarins, ballet. n.p., n.d.
§ Francoise et Cortillard, for voice.
Bordeaux: E. Philibert, 1877.
§ Le Garyon troquct: Chanson-type,
for voice. Paris: Raymond Viel et
Masson, 1887.
Le grillon du foyer, operetta. n.p.,
n.d.
§ J'la connaist, for voice. Paris: chez
Duhem, 1884.
§ La Joumce Champetre, for chorus.
Paris: E. Fromont, 1890.
§ Kikipatchouli et Kakaoli: Duo
chinois, for vocal duet. Paris: G.
Ondet, 1891.
§ La Klephte: Chant. drarnatique ori­ental.
Paris: E. Fromont, 1888.
§ La Malagaise: Seguedille, for voice.
Paris: E. Fromont, 1888.
§ Le Marinde la France: Chansonnette
de bord. Bordeaux: E. Philibert,
1855.
§ Mephisto masque: Polka fantastique,
for piano. Paris: L. Bathlot et
Heraud, 1889.
§
§
§
t
§
§
§
Mephisto masque: Polka fantastique,
for orchestra. Paris: L. Bathlot et
Heraud, 1889.
Mirliton fin de siccle: Polka ori­ginate,
for orchestra. Paris: E.
Fromont, 1891.
Mirlitoo fin de sicclc: Polka ori­ginate,
for piano and mirliton. Paris:
E. Fromont, 1898.
Mon beau Tyrolicn: Tyrolienne com­ique.
Bordeaux: E. Philibert, 1876.
Mon pauvrc cocur, for voice. n.p.,
1852.
Mon sous off, for voice. Bordeau,c:
E. Philibert, 1876.
Mon sous off' cier: Quadrille brillam,
for orchestra. Bordeaux: E. Philibert,
1877.
Nchana, rcinc des f'ccs, ballet in one
act. n.p., 1862.
Le Noye, opera comique. n.p., n.d.
Les nymphes et chasseurs, ballet in
one acl. n.p., 1880.
Ous'qu'cst mon toreador?, for voice.
Paris: Bathlot et Heraud, 1889.
Le Palmier ouvcrtiure, for orchestra.
n.p., n.d.
Papillon bleu: Grand valse. n.p., n.d.
Paris: Grand valsc. n.p., n.d.
Patriotisme, ballad. n.p., n.d.
La phoceenne: Grand valse. n.p., n.d.
§ El Pronunciamento (la conspira~:on):
Marche espagnole, for piano. Paris:
Bathlot el Heraud, 1886.
Quadrille. n.p., n.d.
§ Quasimodo, for voice. Bordeaux: E.
Philibert, 1865.
§ Quasimodo, for voice. Bordeaux: E.
Philiben, I 869.
§ R~verie champctre: Fantaisie, duet
for violin and violoncello or flute
and bassoon with piano accompani­ment
Paris: Author, 1891.
§ Rosita: Cancion Se vii lanne, for
voice. Paris: J. Pou la lion, 1890.
La sensitive, ballet in two acts. n.p.,
1877.
Si j'etais Jui, for voice. n.p., n.d.
§ Le Serment de I' Araibe: Chant
dramatique, for voice. Bordeaux: E.
Philibert, 1865.
*t "Le scrment de I' Arabe," a dramatic
aria from Sultan d 'Ispahan.
Reprinted in Music and Some Highly
Musical People, James M. Trotter,
pp. [Appendix] 53-59. New York:
Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968.
§ Si tu m'aimais. Arrangement of the
melody by R. Van Erbs. n.p., 1893.
§
§
Spahis et Grisettes, ballet­divertissement
in one act. n.p., 1880.
Sultan d'Ispahan, opera in four acts.
n.p., n.d.
Sylvia, overture. n.p., n.d.
Symphony ("Quasimodo," by 1865).
n.p., n.d.
Titis: d~bardcurs et griseues, for
voice. Paris: Smite, 1876.
Tond les chiens, coup'les chats: Duo
burlesque, for voice. Paris: Puigellier
& Bassereau, 1893.
Le triomphe de Bacchus, ballet­divertissement.
n.p., 1880.
Une aventure de 'Thlemaque, opera.
n.p., n.d.
r ..
§ Une Noce en musique: Chansonnene
comique. Paris: Balhlot et H~ud,
1889.
Vaillant belle rose quadrille. n.p.,
n.d.
The Music of Lucien Lambert
Ah, vous disaise-je maman, piano
transcription. n.p., n.d.
§ Ah! vous dirai-je maman: Caprice,
for piano, Op. 33. Paris: Colombier,
1861.
§ L' Amaronc: Caprice mazurka, for
piano, Op. 67. Paris: Colombier,
1890.
§ L'Americaine: Grande valse bril­lante,
for piano. Paris: Colombier,
1866.
§ Adagio du trio, Op. 11, by
Beethoven. Arrangement for piano.
Manuscript, I 862.
§ Andante ct fantaisie [illegible). for
piano and orchestra. Paris: Heugel,
1892.
§ L' Angelus au monast~re: Pri~e. for
piano. Paris: Impr. de Dinquel, 1854.
§ L' Angelus au monast~rc, ct le
Depart 2 Romances sans paroles, for
piano. Paris: J. Heinz, 1862.
§ Au bord du ruisseau. Paris: Heugel,
1895.
§ Au clair de la lune: Variations et
final, for piano, Op. 30. Paris:
Colombier, 1859.
*H Au clair de la lune, Op. 30. Paris:
Emile Gallet, n.d. Reprinted in Music
and Some Highly Musical People.
James M. Trotter, pp. [Appendix]
69-80. New York: Johnson Reprint
Corp., 1968.
§ Aubade, for voice and piano. Paris:
Comard, 1886.
Bruneau. Transcribed for piano, four
hands. Manuscript, 1902.
§ Les Bords du Rhin: Polka brillante,
for piano. Paris: J. Heinz, 1861.
§ La Bresiliennc: Polka brillante, for
piano, Op. 58. Paris: Colombier,
1864.
§ Bresiliana: Fantaisie caprice brillant,
for piano. Paris: J. Heinz, 1869.
§ Bresiliana: Grande valse brillante,
for piano. Paris: au Menestrel. 1875.
§ Broceliande: Opera feerique in four
acts, piano-vocal score. Paris: au
Menestrel, 1892.
§ Le Calabrais: Galop brillant, for
piano, Op. 39. Paris: Colombier,
1861.
§ La Canadienne: Polka brillante, for
piano, Op. 34. Paris: Colombier,
1861.
§ Caprice mazurka, for piano. Paris:
Mackar et Noel, 1891.
§ Le Camaval de Paris: Variations bril­lantes
sur une chanson populaire de
L. Abadie, for piano, Op. 36. Paris:
Heugel, 1861.
§ Le Camaval venitien: Quadrille bril­lant,
for piano. Paris: Colombier,
18(i().
§ Le Carnaval vcnitien: Quadrille bril­lant,
for piano, four hands. Paris:
Colombier, 1861.
§ Le CastiJlan: Bol6ro, for piano. Paris:
J. Heinz, 1861.
§ Chanson cosaque, for voice and
piano, with choir ad lib. Paris:
Heugel, 1893.
§ Chanson de nourrice, for voice.
Paris: Heugel, 1896.
§ Chants d'oiseause: Melodie, for
chorus and piano. Paris: H. Tellier,
1890.
§ Berceuse. Arrangement of the song §
by L. M. Gottschalk. Paris: A. Noel,
1898.
Les Cloches de Porto: Tableau musi­cal.
Orchestral reduction. Manu­script,
1912.
§ La Belle au bois dormant: Poeme *§ Cloches et clochencs: Etude mazurka
symphonique pour orchestrc, by Alf.
3
brillante, Op. 31, for piano. Paris:
Colombier, 1859.
§ Les Cygncs: Melodie, for voice and
piano. Paris: Bruneau, 1890.
§ Daniella: Polka brillanle, for piano.
Paris: J. Heinz, 1857.
§ Daniella: Polka de salon, for piano,
four hands. Paris: J. Heinz, 1869.
§ Delhi: Polka-mazurka, for piano.
Paris: J. Heinz, 1858.
§ Le depart du conscric Fantaisie­marche,
Op. 32, for piano. Paris:
Colombicr, 1859.
§ En Avant: Galop brillant, for piano,
Op. 45. Paris: Colombier, 1864.
§ Entr'acte to act II, from Le Spahi:
Pocme lyrique, for piano. Paris:
l 'fllustration, 1897.
§ Esquisscs creoles, for orchestra.
Transcribed for piano, four hands.
Paris: n.p., 1898.
Etude-mazurka. n.p., n.d.
§ Fantaisie hongroise, for piano. Paris:
Colombier, 1884.
§ La Flamenca, musical drama in four
acts, piano-vocal score. Paris:
Choudens, 1903.
§ God Save the Queen: English Na­tional
Anthem. Arrangement for
piano, Op. 43. Paris: M. Colombicr,
1862.
§ God Save the Queen (English Na­tional
Anthem). Arrangement for
piano. Paris: Colombier, 1881.
§
§
Hymnis: Drame antique in one act,
for voice and piano with flute or
violin accompaniment. Score and
parts. Paris: Bruneau, 1889.
La juive. n.p., n.d.
Jupiter: Grande polka brillante, for
piano. Paris: J. Heinz, 1859.
§ Legende roumaine d'apr~ des motifs
populaires. Orchestral reduction for
piano, four hands. Paris: Heugel,
1893.
§ La Lyonnaise: Polka-mazurka, for
piano. Paris: Chorel, 1856.
4
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
La L yonnaisc: Polka-mazurka, for
piano. 2nd edition. Paris: au
M6ncs11el, 1857.
Marche fun~brc, for piano, Op 66.
Paris: Colombicr, 1890.
Marlborough: F'antaisie mililaire, for
piano. Paris: F. Janet. 1861.
Marlborough: F'antaisic mili1aire, for
piano. Paris: Colombier, l 881.
La Marseillaise: Oeuvre lyrique, in
one act, piano-vocal score. Paris:
Choudcns, 1900.
Le Niagara: Grande valse brillantc,
for piano, Op. 29. Paris: Colombicr,
1860.
Nouveaux Excrcices journaliers ex-
11aits des Sonates de Beethoven:
Classes et do1gtes. 2 vols. Paris:
Colombier, 1882.
§ Olga: Polka-mazurka, for piano.
Paris: H. Lemoine, 1861.
f§ Ombres aimccs: Reve, for piano, Op.
35. Paris: Colombier, 186 I.
§ L'Onde et Jes roscaux: Grande valsc,
for piano. Paris: J. Heinz, 1859.
§ Ouvcnure de Broceliandc. Paris:
Heugel, 189 I.
Paris, Viennc. n.p., n.d.
§ La Parisienne: Polka brillante, for
piano. Paris: Choret. 1856.
& La Parisiennc: Polka brillante, for
piano. 2nd edition. Paris: au
M6nes11el, 1857.
§ La Penticosa: Drame lyrique in two
acts. Paris: Soci~te musicale G.
Asltuc & Co, 1908.
§ La Pfauvienne: 2me grande polka,
for piano. Paris: au Mencstrel, 185'J.
§ La Peruvienne: 2me grande polka,
for piano. 2nd edition. Paris: au
Mencstrel, 1860.
§ Plaisir des champs: Marceau de
genre, for piano, Op. 60. Paris:
Colombier, 1861.
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
Pluie de Corails. n.p., n.d.
Polka havanaise. for piano. Paris: au
M6nestrel, 1862.
Prelude, fugue ct post! udc, for piano.
Manuscript, 1924.
Reve de bonhcur: Polka-mazurka, for
piano. Paris: 0. Legouise, 1860.
Rcve de bonhcur: Polka-mazurka.
Arranged for piano, four hands by
A. Bouleau-Neldy. Paris: de
Moucelot, I 866.
Le Reve du solitaire: Contemplation,
for piano. Op. 28. Paris: J. Heinz,
1859.
Le Roi Dorgobert: Caprice, for
piano, Op. 44. Paris: ColombiCJ',
1862.
Rose de Noel: Polka mazurka, for
piano. Paris: J. Heinz. 1864.
La rose et le Bengali: Inspiration,
Op. 4, for piano. Paris: L. Escudier,
1854.
La Roussalka: Ballet-Pantomime in
two acts, full score. Paris: Choudcns,
191 I.
Ruisseau d'automne! Paris:
Choudens, 1905.
Sire Olaf: Lcgende dramatique in
three acts. Paris: J. Hameffe, 1888.
Le Spahj: Poome lyriquc in four acts.
Paris: Choudens, 1897.
3 Melodies, for voice and piano. I.
Aubade, II. A 1 'i nnommee. III.
L'ame en dcuil. Paris: Bruneau,
1889.
Voix celestcs: Reverie, for piano,
Op. 40. Paris: Colombicr, 1872.
Venise: Improvisation sur le
Carnaval de Vcnise, for piano. Paris:
Colombier, 1890.
The Music of Sidney Lambert
§ L' Africaine, Op. 14., ltanScription
for piano. Paris: Brondus, 1872.
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
L' Allegresse: Grande valse brillant~,
for piano, Op. 6. Paris: A. Cl H.
Lu inzard Frcrcs, 1868.
Anna Solena, de Donizetti: Petite
fantaisie, for piano. Paris: M.
Colombier, 1872.
Le Cam~lia: Mazurke de salon, for
piano, Op. 21. Paris: L. Gregh. 1882.
Cassilda: Valsc de salon, for piano.
Paris: Loret & Sons and H. Freytag,
1899.
Ccl~bre Tarcntcllc, by Louis Moreau
Gottschalk. Arranged for two pianos,
four hands. Paris: n.p., 1890.
Les Clochcttcs: Fantaisie Mazurka,
Op. 9. Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1872.
(Reprinted in Music and Some
llighly Musical People, James M.
Trotter, pp. (Appendix] 86-95. New
York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968.)
La Coquette: Schottisch, for piano.
n.p.: Author, 1866.
L'Elisire d'amore, opera de
Donizetti: Petite fantaisie, for piano.
Paris: M. Colombier, 1870.
L'Elisire d'amorc, opera de
Donizetti: Fanlaisie, Op. 8, for piano.
Paris: A. Leduc, 1872.
Fleurs aimces: Mazurka, for piano.
Paris: Lorct & Sons, 1889.
Flcurs aim6cs: Polka-mazurka, for
piano. Paris: M. Colombier, 1880.
Gavotte, from L'A/bum du jeune
pianiste. for piano. Paris: LorcL &
Sons, 1887.
Marchc des demoisclles, for piano.
Paris: Lorct & Sons and H. Freytag,
1895.
Mazurka Tyrolienne, for piano, Op.
11. Paris: A. Leduc. 1873.
Mazurka Tyrolicnne, for piano. 2nd
edition. Paris: A. Leduc, 1874.
§ Menuet, for piano. Paris: M.
Colombier, 1883.
§ Mon Etoile: Celebre valse, by F. A.
Rcnte. Arrangement for piano. Paris:
n.p., 1872.
§ Murmures du Soir: Caprice, for
piano, Op. 18. Paris: J. Hillard,
1876.
§ Ninette: Valse, for piano. Paris:
Loret & Sons and H. Freytag, 1896.
§ Ninon: Valse, for piano. Paris: Loret
& Sons and H. Freytag, 1897.
§ Ninon-Ninette: Menuet, for piano.
Paris: Loret & Sons and H. Freytag,
1896.
§ 0 Sanctissima, for piano, Op. 17.
Paris: M. Colombier, 1876.
§ Perle haitienne: Polka-mazurka, for
piano, Op. 3. Paris: M. Colombier,
1867.
§ Petite Fantaisie sur "La Som•
nambule," by V. Bellini. Arrange­ment
for piano. Paris: n.p., 1872.
§ Premieres l~ons de piano ~ la ponce
des enfants du 1. ~ge, Op. 28. Paris:
Loret & Sons, 1886.
* Rescue Polka Mazurka, for piano.
Providence, R.I.: Cory Brothers,
1869.
§ Romance de "La Cruche cass6e":
opera-comique, by Emile Pessard.
Transcription for piano, Op. 12.
Paris: A. Leduc, 1873.
§ Si j'etais roi, d'A. S. Adam: Reverie,
for piano. Paris: A. Leduc, 1868.
§ La Sonnambule (Petite fantaisie sur
I~). Op. 10, for piano. Paris: A.
Leduc, 1872.
t Stella mon etoile: Celebre valse. Ar­rangement
of the melody of the same
name composed by F. A. Rente. New
Orleans: Philip Werlein, 1879.
§ Les Sylphes: Impromptu, for piano,
Op. 13. Paris: A. Leduc, 1873.
§ Transport joyeux: Valse de salon, for
piano. Op. 16. Paris: J. Hielard,
1874.
§ Transport joyeux: Valse de salon, for
piano. 2nd edition. Paris: J. Hielard,
1875.
§ Valse caprice, for piano, Op. 23.
Paris: L. Gregh, 1883.
§ Valse caprice, for piano, Op. 23. 2nd
edition. Paris: L. Gregh, 1884.
§ Vive la Polka, for piano. Paris: M.
Ravelet, 1882.
The Music of Eugene V.
Macarty
*t+ Fleurs de salon: 2 Favorite Polkas
("L' Alzea: Polka mazurka" and "La
Caprifolia: Polka de salon"), arrange­ment
for piano. New Orleans: n.p.,
1854.
The Music of Samuel Snaer
Allegro. n.p., n.d.
Le bohemien (by 1877). 111.p .• n.d.
5
t Chant bachique, for male choir.
Manuscript. n.d.
Le chant des canotiers. n.p., n.d.
*t Le chant du deporte, for voice. New
Orleans: Louis Grunewald, 1865.
Donnez, mes chhes amours. n.p.,
n.d.
Grand scene lyrique. n.p .. , n.d.
Graziella Overture, for orchestra.
n.p., n.d.
t Magdalena: Valse, for piano. Manu­script.
n.d.
* Mass for Three Voices. "Gloria" and
"Agnus Dei" reprinted in Music and
Some Highly Musical People, James
M. Trotter, pp. [Appendix] 127-152.
New York: Johnson Reprint Corp.,
1968.
t+ Rappelle-toi, for voice. New Orleans:
Louis Grunewald, 1865.
*H Sous sa fenetre, for voice. New
Orleans: Louis Grunewald, 1866.
Le vampire. n.p., n.d.

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

The items digitized in this collection are the property of the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago. Items may be used freely, with attribution, for research and educational purposes. For permission to publish, distribute, or use this item for any other purpose, please contact Reference at the Center for Black Music Research at cbmrref@colum.edu or (312) 369-7586.

BLACK MUSIC RESEARCH
NEWSLETTER sy, Amistad Resrord1 Ce11ter, Louisiaua
Music Collcctio11.
ductor. His early training in music
was with Eugene Prevost, Richard
Lambert, Constantin Deburque, and
Ludovico Gabici, the director of the
St. Charles Theatre orchestra. His
father, the director of a militia band
in New Orleans, recognized his spe­cial
musical ability and sent him to
Mexico for further studies in 1848.
Subsequently, he traveled possibly to
England, then to Belgium in search of
a suitable place to pursue his musical
interests. He even tu ally arrived in
Paris where he found a hospitable en­vironment,
and entered the Paris Con­servatory
of Music in 1857. Arthur La
Co11ti1111ed on page 6
6
Composers Comer, co11ti11ued
Brew, who has done extensive re­seard1
on Dede, believes that he is
possibly the first black American to
study at the Paris Conservatory and
the first to compose an opera.
Settling in Bordeaux, France, be­tween
1860 and 1862, Dede became
the director of L'Alcazar Theater Or­chestra,
a post he held for twenty-five
years. It is reported that he became a
friend of Charles-Fran.ist
in New Orleans with particular relation­ships
between the genres and with
common performance practices? What
were the cultural and social differences
among the musics and the musicians
who performed them? How does one
go about researching the various tradi­tions
with the purpose of answering
questions such as those presented
here? What are the tools for identifying,
locating, and obtaining the printed and
recorded music of all genres? What are
the tools, methodologies, and re­sources
for developing bibliographies
and discographies of the music? The
conference has been pl,mned to ad­dress
such questions as these.
Eight topics will be explored, each
paper focusing on the particular tools,
methods, and resources for researching
its subject. The abstracts that follow in­dica
te some of the matters that will be
given consideration in each of the pre­sentations.
Participants
Barry Jean Ancelet, presenter, Di­rector,
Folklore Program, University
of Southwestern Louisiana; speci.ilist
in Cajun and Creole music and
folklore; author of Tiu• Making of Cajun
Music (University of Texas Press,
1984).
Calvert Bean, Jr. , respondent, pro­gram
director for classical music,
WPLN-FM radio; associate editor of
Blnck M11sic Resenrc/1 Jo11rnnl; author of
"Retrospective: The Black Composers
Series," Black Music Rt':ii!arch Newslet­ter,
4, no. 3 (1981).
Jason Berry, respondent, author of
articles about jazz, popular music,
and culture, indud ing Amn:i11g Groce:
Witl1 Chnrh•s Evers in Mississippi (Three
Continents, 1973) and Up from //,e Cra­dle
of Jnzz: N,w Orlea11s Music Since
'Mlrld War II (University of Georgia,
1986).
Florence Borders, presenter, Direc­tor,
Chircory Society of Afro­Louisiana
History and Culture; Refer­ence
Archivist, Amistad Research
Center, New Orleans, Louisiana;
specialist in Creole music and dance.
Horace Boyer, presenter, Curator,
Division of Musical Instruments, The
Smithsonian Institution; authority on
Afro-American gospel music and au­thor
of significant articles on the sub­ject
in The Black Perspectit•e i11 Music,
Black World, and other scholarly jour­nals.
Lawrence Gushee, presenter, Pro­fessor
of Music at the University of
Illinois; author of articles on Jelly Roll
Morton and Lester Young, notes for
recordings of King Oliver, Freddie
Keppard, and Duke Ellington, and
books and articles on various aspects
of Medieval music.
Joyce Jackson, respondent, doctoral
candidate in Folklore-Ethnomusicol­ogy
at Indiana University; author of
articles on black sacred music in
Discourse i11 Etl1110111usicology II:
A Tribute lo Ala11 P. Merriam (Indiana
University Ethnomusicology Publica­tions
Group, 1981) and Snt11rday Night
and Sunday Momi11g (National Council
for the Traditional Arts and the NEA
Folk Arts Program, 1986).
Portia Maultsby, respondent,
Chairperson, Department of Afro­American
Studies, and Associate Pro­fessor
of Ethnomusicology at Indiana
University; author of the monograph
"Black American Popular Song:
Rhythm and Blues, 1945-55" (Program
in Black American Culture-Museum
of American Historv, Smithsonian In­stitution,
1986), articles on soul and
contemporary popular music in the
/011mal of Popular C11lt11re and Billbonrd,
and a forthcoming book tentatively ti­tled
Popular Music of Blnck Amaica.
Mark McKnight, presenter, As­sociate
Professor, Loyola University
Library; author of papers presented
at Music Library Association and Son­neck
Society meetings, including a
presentation on a performer of urban
.tydeco music: "My Search for Rockin'
Dopsee: Problems in Cataloging Local
Popular Sound Recordings"; guest
editor, "Music Collections in
Louisiana Libraries," Louisiana Library
Bulletin (forthcoming, summer 1988).
Kenyon Rosenberg, respondent,
Associate Director for Bibliographic
and Document Services, National
Technical Information Service, United
States Department of Commerce,
Washington, D.C.; former Associate
Director, Kent State University Li­braries.
Austin Sonnier, Jr., respondent,
professional artist, musician, poet,
and lecturer on black musics in
Louisiana; has published many works
including Willie Genry "Bimk" Joh11so11:
The New Iberia Years (Crescendo, 1977)
and articles on zydeco, blues, jazz,
and Creole music in Louisiana.
Lester Sullivan, presenter, Ar­chivist
of the Amistad Research
Center, New Orleans, Louisiana; au­thor
of articles on church history,
Afro-American genealogy, and paint­er
Jacob Lawrence; and the host of the
"Twentieth-Century Classical Show"
on radio station WTUL-FM in New Or­leans.
Richard Wang, presenter, Professor
of Music at the University of IUinois-
Chicago; President of the Jazz Insti­tute
of Chicago; author of "Jazz Circa
1945: A Confluence of Styles," Musical
Q11arterly, 59, no. 4 (October 1973),
531-546.
Ron Welburn, respondent, former
coordinator of the NEA's Jazz Oral
History Project at the Institute of Jazz
Studies, Rutgers University, and
former editor o£TlteGrackle: Improvised
M11sic i11 Transition; author of "Toward
Theory and Method with the Jazz
Oral History Project," Black Music Re­search
Journal (1986).
Abs tracts
"Tracking the Tradition: New Orleans
Sacred Music"
Horace Boyer
Until recently the missing link in
the history of black music in New Or­leans
was its quiet but significant re­ligious
music tradition. Yet, Afro­American
religious music has held a
strong position in black New Orleans
since the 1880s, influencing all black
music in that city from the brass bands
of the nineteenth century to zydeco
music of the late twentieth century.
The failure of the black religious music
of New Orleans to establish a reputa­tion
and tradition, despite its influ­ence,
presents a paradox not easily
untangled.
Black American religious music, or
the Africanization of white religious
music, made its appearance in New
Orleans as early as the 1880s. It was
during this time that the trend toward
extemporaneous performances by
brass bands was established. Some of
the music played and improvised
upon-principally through embellish­ment-
were Negro spirituals and
white Protestant hymns. At the same
time a group of black Catholics were
composing and performing religious
music, and though their influence
was small, they ultimately came to
play a significant part in the city's
music history. These included Samuel
Snaer (c1832-cl880), Edmond Dede
(1827-1903), and Basile Bares (1845-
1902). This group was augmented by
William J. Nickerson (1865-1928) in the
first quarter of the twentieth century.
During the first decade of the twen­tieth
century, religious music gained
substantial recognition through its
use both as mournful music, played
by marching bands on the way to the
grave, and as lively, swinging music
on the return from the grave. The lat­ter
was taken up and developed in a
different direction by the holiness
churches that were introduced into
New Orleans between 1900 and 1910.
This was the music that first inspired
gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. The
music of the street meetings of holi­ness
congregations and traveling
evangelists had a strong impact on the
musical preferences of the inhabi­tants,
moving their interests away
from the music of the Catholic church.
By the 1950s New Orleans was a
major gospel music city, though
it never became a gospel music ce11ter,
producing such gospel singers as Bes­sie
Griffin (b. 1927), Linda Hopkins
("Baby Helen," b. 1925), and the
queen of gospel, Mahalia Jackson
(1911-1972). None of these gospel
music figures gained fame in their
home town, partially because New
Orleans had not yet become a gospel
music center. For the first time in its
history, New Orleans is attempting to
establish itself as a gospel music
center through the diligent work of
the New Orleans Humming Four and
the Soprano Spiritual Singers, both of
whom follow the quartet tradition es­tablished
by male quartets of Alabama
and Virginia in the early 1920s.
There is, however, information on
the quiet and somewhat obscure Afro­American
religious music tradition in
New Orleans, though a circuitous
route is the only path to its discovery.
This presentation will be concerned
with the few history books, novels,
biographies, newspapers, religious
denominational histories and min­utes,
and personal ilnterviews, tools,
and methodologies for researching
gospel music in New Orleans.
"Typology of Sources for the History
of New Orleans Jazz"
Lllwrence Gushee
The two principal sources for writ­ing
the history of New Orleans jazz
have been interviews and recordings.
There are a great many other sources
that have been neglected, often be­cause
researchers are unaware of their
existence, or because they are diJficult
of access. This pa per will pass in re-
13
view some sources that have proved
useful in expanding or correcting the
historical record, with instances of the
kind of information to be gained from
them and a few caveats regarding
their use. Distinctions will be made
between their use in confirming infor­mation
gleaned from in terviews and
their power to open new windows
on the past. The sources to be discus­sed
include: photographic evidence
(snapshots, studio portraits, publicity
photos, and newsreels), newspapers
and periodicals (local New Orleans
papers, national theatrical press, gen­eral
periodicals), ephemeral advertis­ing
(handbills, business cards, etc.),
vital statistics, burial records, census
information, military records, police
and court records, licenses, published
and unpublished music, copyright re­cords,
contracts, artifacts, letters,
diaries, and address books.
"Tools and Methods for Researching
the Chicago Migration"
Richard Wang
When researching the New Or­leans-
Chicago connection, the re­searcher
of jazz music must confront
two sacred legends that bar entry to
the temple of responsible scholarship.
First, there is the legend that it was
the closing of fabled Storyville (New
Orleans's "red-light district") by the
Navy Department in 1917 that caused
a major exodus of musicians from the
city; second, that this great migration
was solely directed north along the
Mississippi River toward Chicago. In
fact, the migration of well-known
New Orleans jazzmen began as early
as 1904-1905 and continued until after
the closing of Storyville. Furthermore,
the economic impact of Storyville's
closing upon musicians has been
greatly exaggerated; they continued
to find steady employment in New
Orleans after 1917. Although the
exodus eventually included a signifi­cant
number of New Orleans's most
important musicians, many stayed be­hind
and found work. Likewise, ac­cording
to the legend, jazz came up
the Mississippi River to Chicago from
New Orleans. That may be an attrac­tive
odyssey, but it is bad geography
and worse history. The Mississippi
Co11tinued on page 14
14
National Conference, co11ti1111ed
River does not flow through Chicago;
about the closest one could get to it
on a riverboat would be Moline, Il­linois,
across the state from Chicago.
The best way to get to Chicago from
New Orleans was to go north on the
"green diamond" -the symbol ap­pearing
on the rolling stock of the Il­linois
Central Railroad.
Chicago's black-owned newspapers
played a critical role in making south­ern
blacks aware of the economic, edu­cational,
and social opportunities
awaiting them in the North. This was
especially the case during the "Great
Black Migration" of 1916 to 1920 when
approximately fifty thousand south­ern
blacks immigrated to Chicago,
creating the South-Side Black Belt so
essential to black culture in Chicago.
What can we learn about the New
Orleans-Chicago connection from
oral histories, and how reliable are
they? There are, of course, obvious
problems in attempting to obtain ac­curate
information from the testimony
of a memorist. But careful planning
and appropriate methodology can
and do elicit reliable reports.
This paper will address the ques­tion
of what happened to New Or­leans
musical traditions and styles
when they reached Chicago during
and after the migrations of the early
decades of the century. Given the fact
that the earliest known recordings of
jazz were made in New York, Los
Angeles, and, most importantly,
Chicago (and not in New Orleans),
can we extrapolate backwards from
these documents to postulate an ear­lier
or even contemporaneous New
Orleans style? What can we learn
about the New Orleans-Chicago con­nections
from the music itself? Finally,
this paper will discuss the tools,
methodology, and resources required
for the research of the modes,
methods, and relationships of the
migration of jazz musicians from New
Orleans to Chicago.
"Researching Composers of Color in
Nineteenth-Century New Orleans"
Lester S111/iva11
New Orleans introduced opera to
the United States, with the city's opera
house prompting the creation of Euro-pean
forms and styles by New Or­leans
composers. The ballroom, the
salon, the parade grounds, the
church, and a thriving local sheet
music industry all contributed to and
supported the demand. What espe­cially
distinguished the Crescent City
from similar early centers of American
musical life, however, was the pres­ence
of an unusually large black popu­lation,
the members of which were
allowed to participate in the creation
of this music. By mastering perform­ance
on European instruments and
composition in European forms and
styles, Protestant, English-speaking
Anglo-American blacks and Roman
Catholic, Frencl1-speaking Creoles of
color in New Orleans ultimately trans­mitted
European influences to the de­velopment
of jazz. Likewise, the pres­ence
of classically-trained black musi­cians
may have influenced other
Creole composers, such as Louis
Moreau Gottschalk, to incorporate Af­rican
characteristics in their music.
This paper will attempt to (1) explore
the historical background of the
unique black ethnicity of the city, (2)
identify the city's major nineteenth­century
black composers, (3) treat the
phonomenon of expatriate black New
Orleanians in Europe, (4) survey re­sources
for the study of the composers
and their work, and (5) pose some
questions about the significance of
this little-known history.
"Sources for the Study of Creole and
Cajun Music and Their Influence on
New Orleans Music"
Florence Borders
The search for sources of informa­tion
about Creole and Cajun music
begins at home and spreads abroad.
Although both Creoles and Cajuns
are French-languago:? groups that set­tled
in colonial Louisiana, they de­veloped
distinct types of music. The
Creoles preceded the Cajuns by sev­eral
decades and considered them
more in the vein of country cousins.
When the Acadians, or Cajuns, were
exiled from what is now Nova Scotia
by the British, they sought a new
homeland. They began arriving in
Louisiana between 1755 and 1765 and
settled in the southwestern part of the
state.
Black Creoles came to Louisiana as
early as other immigrant groups.
Most of them, however, came as
slaves, the first cargo !having been
shipped one year after the founding
of New Orleans in 1718. Very soon
after their arrival, they were permit­ted
to engage in Sunday recreations
in a large square where they could
sing and dance. They performed
familiar dances coupled with lyrics
that they themselves composed in
their French-based language, accom­panying
themselves on instruments
that they fashioned from materials at
hand. Survivals of these songs and
dances became known as Creole slave
songs. The contributions of these
black Creoles to the musical heritage
of Louisiana and the United States
were witnessed by nineteenth cen­tury
observers, documented by
nineteenth and twentieth century
scholars, and perpetuated by musi­cians.
The Cajuns produced rural French
folk music. Their geographic isola­tion,
combined with their desire to
protect their way of life from outside
forces, enabled them to cling to their
cultural heritage for many decades.
Eventually, the music became known
to a wider audience, influencing and
being influenced by that of other
groups, notably white English-speak­ing
people and southern blacks.
Today black Cajun music enjoys inter­national
attention, and its instrumen­tation
has broadened from the fidd le
and accordian duo to include electric
and steel guitars and drums. Lyrics
are sung in Cajun French, but may
also be sung in English, reflecting the
impact of commercialization.
Far from being isolated ethnic
groups with minuscule impact on
mainstream culture, Creole and
Cajun musicians have been major con­tributors
to the musical heritage of the
state and the nation. Bibliographies
and discographies will increase our in­formation
about these influences. Au­tobiographies
and biographies of
musicians who came from both
backgrounds will demonstrate the
truth of the adage that music speaks
a universal language. The geographic
distribution of the collections of
sources for researching Creole and
Cajun music will indicate the impor­tance
of the music in the total spec-
trum of our cultural heritage.
"Zarico: [Zydeco) Beans, Blues, and
.Beyond"
Barry Jean Ancelet
Like the blues, rock, jazz, and reg­gae,
zarico is the result of a blend of
European (primarily French) and
Afro-Caribbean music traditions.
South Louisiana folk etymology ex­plains
that the word comes from the
line "Les haricots sont pas sales" (The
beans aren't salty), used in many of
the tradition's songs; but a look at
Creole traditio11s and the languages
of Africa's west coast shows zarico in­volves
more than beans. In the earliest
Alan Lomax recordings (1934) as well
as in contemp-Orary music, "zarico"
functions like "blues'' in American
English, referring to hard times and
the music that eased the pain of hard
times. Zarico also has a sexual con110-
tation related to its likely origins in
African fertility ritual music and
dance. It has a broad social applica­tion,
referring to dances and dancers,
as well as music and musicians.
"Researching New Orleans Rhythm
and Blues: Identifying the Sources"
Mark McK11ight
Although New Orleans is most
often defined as the birthplace of jazz,
it is a city whose musical heritage is
as rich and varied as its justly famous
cuisine. It is the very complexity of
New Orleans's musical life, both past
and present, that has interested music
researchers in exploring the city's cul­tural
and musical roots. Whereas most
serious musical scholarshjp concern­ing
New Orleans music has in the past
Introducing . . .
focused on early jazz, a few studies
in the last decade have concentrated
on the area's non-jazz musical culture,
principally, rhythm and blues.
While New Orleans's influence on
post-World War II popular music is
often overlooked by popular music
scholars, even a cursory examination
of the musicians who flourished in
New Orleans in the twenty years be­tween
World War II and the British
invasion of the rn.id-1960s confirms
the importance of New Orleans
rhythm and blues in the rock-and-roll
revolution.
For the serious researcher, attempts
at finding sources of information on
post-war music in New Orleans, espe­cially
that of lesser known musicians,
can be frustrating. Some of these prob­lems
stem from the fact that those in­terested
in this field have not always
possessed the necessary research
skills. As a result, many of the tools
currently available are less than ideal.
This paper will focus on resources a­vailable
to researchers, both tradi­tional
and non-traditional kinds of
sources, and lacunae in existing mate­ria
ls. The paper wiil also shed light
on potential new areas of investiga­tion
for popular music scholars.
"The CBMR Database and the CBMR
Bulletin Board"
CBMR Staff
The CBMR Database consists of
two complimentary parts. The U11ion
Catalog of Black Music Materials i11
Selected Chicago-Arca Libraries is de­signed
for the purpose of providing
local and visiting scholars with a re­source
for ascertai11ing what materials
Members of the National Advisory Board of
The Center for Black Music Research
by Bruce T11cker, New Brunswick, Nl'lv Jersey
National Advisory Board member
Or. Clifton H. Johnson sees a clear
connection between the Amistad Re­search
Center, of which he is execu­tive
director, and the work of the
Center for Black Music Research.
"Just as the Amistad Center did, the
Center for Black Music Research is en-tering
a field that has not been
explored," he says. "I see the Center
as making the whole area more visible
and promoting resea·rch in the field."
Founded by Dr. Johnson in 1969
and supported, in part, by the Ameri­can
Missionary Association, the Arrus­tad
Research Center, located in New
15
pertinent to a particular black music
topic are held in which of the selected
Chlcago-area Libraries. The establish­ment
of the Union Catalog will facili­tate
and stimulate research in black
music, providing scholars with easy
access to Hsts of materials pertinent
to various topics of interest. The Refer­ence
System is designed to provide
scholars with an unprecedented level
of extensive and detailed access to
sound recordings, sheet music, music
manuscripts, and vertical file mate­rials.
The CBMR Bulletin Board is a
forum for individuals interested in
black music research. It is useful to
scholars and musicians who fre­quently
or occasionally need: 1) infor­mation
about out-of-print books,
printed music, recordings, films, and
videotapes; 2) information about cur­rent
research activity; 3) bibliographi­cal
and discographical information; 4)
name/subject authority information
relating to black musicia.ns and black
music research; 5) computer programs
useful to scholars; 6) and other infor­mation
pertinent to research and writ­ing.
The usefulness to scholars of the
CBMR Database, with its Union
Catalog and Reference System, and
the CBMR Bulletin Board will be de­monstrated
through searches and re­trievals
on microcomputers.
For information about attending the
Conference, write to: National Confer­ence
on Black Music Research, Center
for Black Music Research, Columbia
College, 600 South Michigan Avenue,
Chicago, IL 60605-1996.
Orleans, collects original source mate­rial
for the study of America's ethnk
minorities, with a primary emphasis
on Afro-Americans. The center holds
more than eight million items, the
largest such repository in the world.
Continued 011 page 16
16
Johnson, continued
Dr. Clifton H. Johnson
The core of its archives includes the
approximately three thousand docu­ments
relating to the Amistad incident,
the celebrated abolitionist issue out of
which the American Missionary As­sociation
evolved. In 1839 two
Spanish slaveowners, having pur­chased
in Havana fifty-three Africans
brought there illegally, booked pas­sage
on the merchant ship Amis/ad.
While the ship was becalmed in
Havana harbor, the Africans seized
control of the ship and forced the
Spaniards to sail toward the rising
sun. But at night the Spaniards
steered the ship northward, until they
"The question," says board member
Dempsey J. Travis, president of his
own realty and insurance companies
since 1949 and recently the author of
several pioneering studies of black cul­ture,
"is not how did I get involved
in black history and black music, but
how did I get involved in business."
His three books- An A11tobiography
of Black Chicago (Urban Research Insti­tute,
1981 ), An A11tobiogrnphy of Black
Jazz (Urban Research Institute, 1983),
and A11 Autobiogrnplzy of Black Politics
(Urban Research Institute, 1986)-all
grew out of experiences and interests
that long preda.ted his successful bus­iness
career.
"My father came to Chicago in 1900
and his brother a little earlier," says
arrived in Long Island Sound, where
the ship was intercepted by the U.S.
Navy. Abolitionists, ,coming to the aid
of the Africans, carried the fight all
the way to the U.S. Supreme Court,
which eventually allowed the Afri­cans
to return to Africa.
In addition to the Amistad papers
and materials relating to the American
Missionary Association and the in­stitutions
it founded, the center has
in its vast collection some notable
musical material, including the pa­pers
of composer Howard Swanson.
The center has also been designated
as the repository for the papers of
Hale Smith and Roger Dickerson. Two
of the Center's oral history collections
also focus on music-one of New Or­leans
jazz musicians and one of
Chicago jazz musicians.
"The center was originally found­ed,"
says Dr. Johnso;n, "because of the
neglect of Afro-American history."
In fact, he says, he was shamed into
it.
"In 1950 I went to teach at
LeMoyne, a black college in Mem­phis,"
he says. "Though I had a mas­ters
degree in American history from
the University of Chicago and had
comleted my residency for my doc­torate
at the University of North
Carolina, I knew nothing about black
history. It just absolutely embarrassed
me when my students would bring
up names and incidents that I knew
nothing about. So I began to educate
myself in black history. From there, I
Travis. "They used to tell me what
Chicago was like. I was fascinated
with all these stories about the city.
Then, as a young man, I became dis­appointed
because I couldn't read
about any of this anywhere."
To remedy that, Travis interviewed
more than two hundred people, most
of them more than eighty years of age,
and researd1ed thousands of news­paper
articles and books to produce
his story of black Chicago, from the
arrival of Jean Baptiste DuSable in
1779 up to 1981.
"l broadened it, obviously," he
says, "but the book. is a reaffirmation
of the information I'd gotten from my
father and uncle."
The elder Travis, in addition to tell-realized
that it was important that
something be done to make the re­sources
available for the study of black
history. And that's how the Amistad
Research Center began."
Dr. Johnson has also taught at East
Carolina College, the University of
New Orleans, and Dillard University.
From 1966 to 1969, while at Fisk Uni­versity,
he served as dil'ector of the
American Missionary Association's
Race Relations Department. He has
been a consultant to the United States
Department of Education and has
served on boards and on committees
for numerous organizations including
the United Nations Association of
Memphis, the Tennessee Council of
Human Relations, the National Com­mittee
Against Discrimination in
Housing, the Center for the Study of
Southern Culture, the Louisiana Arts
Council, and the Louisiana Folklore
Commission.
His numerous scholarly publica­tions
focus primarily on Afro-Ameri­can
history, with an emphasis on the
antebellum period and the aboli­tionist
movement. He edited God
Struck Me Dead: Religious Conversion
Experiences and the Autobiographies of
Ex-Slaves (Pilgrim Press, 1969), an oral
history collection.
The study of black music, he says,
is central to black history: "Afro­American
music .is certainly a major
expression of Afro-American culture
and one of the original contributions
to American history and music."
ing stories, played blues piano at rent
parties and in clubs around Chicago
in the twenties. Unable to read music,
he sent his son to music school at age
five. By age thirteen, young Dempsey
was performing professionally in
clubs around the city, playing piano
in a style influenced by Earl Hines.
By age six teen, he was fronting his
own big band-Jack Travis and His
Orchestra. The high point came at the
Savoy Ballroom in 1938 in a mammoth
battle of the bands, including those
of Fletcher Henderson, Lil A rm­strong,
and more than twenty other
prominent groups of the day.
In the Army during World War IJ,
he formed jazz bands that played for
USO dances. He was also shot in a
race riot at an army base in Shenango,
Pennsylvania, in 1943. After the war
he studied music at Roosevelt Univer­si
ty and was graduated in 1949. Big
bands had fallen on hard times, so he
chose a ca reer in business instead. "l
wanted to eat regularly," he says.
Nevertheless, his friendships with
hundreds of jazz musicians and the
absence of books by blacks on black
music led him to write An Autobiog­raphy
of Black Jazz, modeled on the ear­lier
book about Chicago. Both books,
published by his own press, Urban
Research Institute Publishing Com­pany,
quickly established themselves
on the bestselier list in the Chicago
area and stayed there for months.
His book on black politics grew out
of his long-standing friendship with
Chicago mayor Harold Washington.
Originally, Travis in tended to produce
a biography of the mayor, but he SOM
expanded it, in the manner of his pre­vious
books, to encompass the entire
For thirty years board member
Martin Williams has been among the
foremost critics and researchers of
American art and culture. He has de­voted
much of his professional life to
an evaluation of that culture.
Martin Williams
"We have produced some of the
best and most influential artists of the
century," he says, "and have evolved
our own highEy influential genres of
art: jazz and its associa ted dance,
musical theate1·, the movies, the comic
history of black politics in the area.
The book, based on interviews with
nearly four hundred people and on
more than fifteen thousand news­paper
articles and two hundred
books, took three and a half years to
complete.
In addition to his writing, publish­ing,
and business activities, Travis has
served as a trustee for Northwestern
Memorial Hospital, Garrett Evangeli­cal
Theological Seminary, the Na­tional
Housing Conference, and the
Chicago Historical Society; as director
of the Museum of Broadcast Com­munications;
and as a member of the
board of directors of UnibancTrust
Company, Unibanc Inc., and the
Chicago World's Fair 1992 Authority.
He has participated in five Chicago
television documentaries, all nomi­nated
for local Emmy awards.
Of the Center for Black Music Re­search,
he says, "I think it's a god­send.
Had there been such a center
strip, and our variants of traditional
literary forms ."
Probably best known for his work
in jazz, he has produced journalism,
reviews, and scholarly research in
dozens of publications both here and
abroad. He has published five books
on jazz including the biographical­critical
study Jazz Masters of New Or­lea11s
(Macmillan, 1967) and the well­received
critical and theoretical work
The Jazz Tmditio11 (Oxford, 1983). In ad­dition,
he is the author of Where's t/ze
Melody? A Liste11cr's Introd11ction to Jazz
(Pantheon Books, 1966), Jazz Masters
in Tra11sition, 1957-1969 (Macmillan,
1970), and Jazz Heritage, (Oxford,
1985). He edited The Art of Jazz (Ox­ford,
1959) and Jazz Panorama
(Crowell-Collier, 1962) and was gen­eral
editor of the Macmillan "Jazz
Masters" series.
Composer and conductor Gunther
Schuller called The Jazz Trad it ion "a bril­liant
and concise summation of the
major developments and figures in
jazz." In 1973 the book was awarded
an ASCAP-Deems Taylor award for ex­cellence
in music criticism. Of the in­troductory
Where's the Melody?, The
New Yorker wrote that it "makes a dif­ficult
subject seem difficult, and abso­lutely
understandable." Dan Morgen-
17
Dempsey J. Travis
when I was pulling my material on
jazz together, the book would have
been more comprehensive, and l
wouldn't have had to sweat quite so
hard."
stern, Director of the Rutgers Univer­sity
Institute of Jazz Studies, has
said that Will iams is "the most
distinguished critic America has
produced."
Williams has also contributed past
and current entries on jazz to several
standard reference volumes, includ­ing
Britm111ica, the l11ternatio11al Cy­clopedia
of Mu,.ic mid Musicians, Amcr­icm1a,
Book of K11owledge, Tlze New Grove
Dictionary of Music and M11sicia11s,
Jcfferso11, and Collier's E11cyc/opedia
Yearbook. He founded and edited,
with Nat Hentoff, the Jmz Review.
From 1971 to 1981 he served as Di­rector
of the Jazz and American Cul­ture
Programs at the Smithsonian In­stitution.
Since 1982 he has been
Editor, Special Projects, at the Smith­sonian
Institu tion Press. He selected
and annotated the record anthology
The S111ithso11ia11 Collect ion of Classic
Jazz, and he has taught courses in jazz
history at numerous institu tions.
Williams has also pursued other as­pects
of the culture of the United
States. He has written on film, the
musical stage, theater, children's liter­ature,
the comic strip, and television.
And he has collated and produced ar-
Continued on page 18
18
Williams, co11ti1111ed
chival American Musical Theater re­cordings
for the Smithsonian.
Film historian William K. Everson
called Williams's study D. W Griffith:
First Artis/ of 1/ze Movies (Oxford Uni­versity
Press, 1980) "an ideal introduc­tion
to all the other books on Griffith
and the films themselves."
With Bill Blackbeard, he co-edited
and co-annotated Tlzc S111if/1so11ia11 Col­lectio11
of Nt•wspaper Co111ics (Smithso­nian
Institution Press, 1977), called by
the New York Times "a book every social
philosopher will want to ponder."
With Mike Barrier, he edited A Smitlz­so11in11
Book of Co111ic Book Co111ics. His
latest book is TV: Tlze Casual Art. (Ox­ford,
1982).
News and Notes From
Williams's work on American chil­dren's
literature has included con­tributions
to the scholarly periodical
Clzildre11'$ Litemt11rc! :ind to Tlte Penguin
Companio11 to Children's Literature. He
has lectured widely on jazz, film, and
children's literatu re; he has conducted
institutes in criticism for the Music
Critics Association; and in 1978 he
was awarded a Guggenheim Fellow­ship.
Rather than pursue his subjects
only from the perspective of a scholar
or critic, Williams has actively worked
in several of the fields about which he
has written. He has worked in radio
and television on both sides of the
microphone and camera, and he has
been an actor on stage and in film.
He helped write Mort Sahl's Broad-
The Center for Black Music Research
/Jy Joseplzi11e Wriglzt, Tlze College of Wooster
Pianist Adullah Ibrahim appeared
in concert in Boston, Massachusetts,
for the first time during the summer
of 1986. Of the handful of jazz artists
from Africa known in the West,
fbrahim has built a solid reputation in
the jazz community with a career that
spans twenty years and almost thirty
albums. AnativeofCapeTown,South
Africa, he left his homeland in 1962,
after he was denied access to medical
school because of mixed racial parent­age.
He settled briefly in Zurich,
Switzerland, where he was discov­ered
by Duke Ell ington, who offered
him his first recording contract.
Ibrahim made his debut in the United
States in 1965 at the Newport Jazz Fes­tival.
He has since participated in
numerous benefit concerts for the
African National Congress and the
Southwest African Peoples Organiza­tion,
which support the liberation
struggle of black South Africans.
The American Society of Univer­sity
Composers will hold its twenty­second
annual conference at North­western
University April 8-12, 1987.
For complete details write: Stephen
L. Syverud, Northwestern University,
School of Music, 711 Elgin Road,
Evanston, IL 60201.
The Center for Black Music Re­search,
the College Music Society,
and the American Musicological Soc­iety
will hold their combined 1987 an­nual
meetings in New Orleans Oc­tober
15-18. For further details about
the CBMR Conference, see the related
article earlier in this issue.
Conductor Charles Darden di­rected
a band concert for the final per­formance
of the Washington Square
Festival in Greenwich Village, New
York City, in August, 1986. The prog­ram
included music by Handel,
Schubert, and Sousa.
Composer Anthony Davis has writ­ten
a new three-act opera entitled X
(The Life a11d Times of Mnlco/111 X), which
received its world premiere by the
City Opera at Lincoln Center in New
York on September 28, 1986 (Chris­topher
Keene, conductor; Ben Holt,
title role). The story was by the com­poser's
younger brother, Christopher
Davis, and the libretto was by poet
Thulani Davis, a second cousin. The
opera is a synthesis of contemporary
avant-garde classical music styles and
"Third Stream" music. Two extended
reviews of the opera appeared in the
New York Times on September 28 and
way review, Tlze Next President; he
wrote a Smithsonian puppet play; and
he has researched television doc­umenh'tries
for CBS.
Williams sees American art at its
best as often definitive expressions of
the twentieth century, and as all but
irresistable forces in the modern
world.
"After all," he says, "we live in a
country which in recent memory has
produced William Faulkner and
Dashiell Hammett; Martha Graham
and Fred Astaire; Eugene O'Neill and
John Ford; Frank Lloyd Wright and
Walt Kelly; Charles Ives and Duke El­lington;
'Leontyne Price and Sarah
Vaughan. And it is possible, by the
way, that de Tocqueville would not
have understood any of them."
October 5, 1986, and an article by An­drew
Porter was published in the Oc­tober
27 issue of The New Yorker.
William Ferris, director of the
Center for the Study of Southern Cul­tu
re (University of Mississippi), an­nounces
a 1987 NEH Summer Semi­nar
for College Teachers at his institu­tion,
focusing on the theme "Blues as
History, Literature, and Culture."The
seminar, which is scheduled for June
15 through August 7, 1987, will be in­terdisciplinary
in scope. Applications
are encouraged from tead1ers oi
music as well as instructors of Ameri­can
and Afro-American Studies. All
inquiries should be addi:essed to Wil­liam
Ferris, Center for the Study of
Southern Culture, University of Mis­sissippi,
University, MS 38677.
MCA Records has begun remaster­ing
and reissuing classic blues,
R & B, and jazz LPs from the catalog
of Chess records, which featured
"race records" and "soul" during the
1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Singer How­lin'
Wolf is the focus of the first dozen
reissues.
Portia Maultsby, of the University
of Indiana-Bloomington, delivered a
paper at the 1986 annual meeting of
the College Music Society. The
November 12, 1986, issue of The
Chro11icle of Higher Ed11calio11 contained
a review of her paper, which discuss­ed
the role of the black church as an
important influence upon popular
music traditions of Afro-Americans.
Maultsby cred ited the performance
style and oratory of black preachers
with laying "the structural and
aesthetic components for music
making in black America."
The Moorland-Spingam Research
Center of Howard University has
been recognized by its parent institu­tion
as the Outstanding Service Unit
in Academic Affairs for 1985-1986. The
selection was made by a special com­mittee
of Howard University faculty
appointed by President James Cheek.
The Moorland-Spingarn Research
Center is compi·ised of several depart­ments:
a Library Division, Manuscript
Division (of which the Music Depart­ment
is a unit), a Support Division,
the Howard University Archives, and
the Howard University Museum. Its
holdings, which date from the
eighteenth century through the pres­ent
day, comprise over 100,000 books,
6,000 linear feet of manuscript mate­rials,
850 oral histories, 4,000 pieces
of sheet music, 7,000 recordings, and
50,000 photographs. (For a more com­plete
description of the Music Depart­ment
and its holdings, see BMR News­letter
8, no. 1:7+.)
Several topical notes pertaining to
the city of New Orleans tha t might be
of interest to readers have come across
the desk of this colLtmnist. Street per­formers
in the French Quarter of the
Crescent City have recently protested
a proposed city ordinance that they
be licensed. The proposal would re­quire
that all performers-musicians,
downs, mimes, jugglers, and dan­cers-
buy a license for $100 each year.
The city already has a ban in effect
against musicians playing music that
can be heard more than twenty-five
feet away.
Visi tors to New Orleans who wish
to hear live performances of blues,
R & B, and jazz by local and out-of­town
musicians will certainly want to
explore some of the dubs listed here:
Tipitina's located at 501 Napolean Av-enue;
the Maple Leaf Bar, 8316 Oak;
Dorothy's Medallion, 3232 Orleans
Avenue; the New Storyville Jazz Hall,
1104 Decatur; and Tyler's Beer Gar­dens,
5234 Magazine. Additional
listings of clubs and perfom,ances
may be obtained by consulting
Wavele11gth, a magazine devoted to
musical activities in New Orleans
(available by writing 1Nm,elc11gth, P.O.
Box 15667, New Orleans, LA 70175),
and the Jolly Jazz Cale11dar, compiled
by Pat Jolly of the New Orleans Jazz
& Heritage Foundation (1205 N. Ram­part
Street, New Orleans, LA 70116).
The Louis Armstrong Park in New
Orleans has presented performances
of festive brass bands for the last two
years during autumn. The Louisiana
Jazz Federation has declared October
as Jazz Awareness Month. This or­ganization
promotes a variety of pub­lic
programs for media as well as live
performances. A schedule of its
events may be obtai11ed by writing di­rectly
to the federation, P.O. Box 7U4,
New Orleans, LA 70186, or by calling
504/242-2323.
Karl Koenig ("Dr.K.") advises that
he has a forthcoming book entitled A
Jazz Walki11gTourof tire Fre11c/1 Quarter.
Jason Berry, Jonathan Foose, and
Thad Jones have written a new jazz
history book called Up from the Cradle
of Jazz: New Orleans Music Si11ce World
War 11, published by the University of
Georgia Press. The book chronicles
black music in the Crescent City from
Professor Longhair and Fats Domino
through Wynton and Bradford Mar­salis.
Roman Catholic Church officials
have announced plans for a new hym­nal,
entitled Lead Me, Guide Mc, which
is aimed at making worship services
and music more meaningful to black
parishioners. The hymnal will be an
anthology compiled from several
sources, including Protestant publica­tions
used by predominantly black
congregations, Negro spirituals,
popular gospel and revival hymns,
traditional Roman Catholic hymns
and chants, original compositions by
Afro-American writers, as well as
songs of African and Caribbean ori­gin.
The project was initiated in 1983
by Auxiliary Bishop James P. Lyke (of
19
Cleveland), who asked black clergy,
educators, and laity for suggestions
of songs to be included in the compi­lation.
A new film, Round Midnight, dedi­cated
to jazzmen Bud Powell and
Lester Young, has been recently re­leased
by Warner Brothers. The film
features Dexter Gordon, Franc;ois
Cluzet, Sandra-Reaves Phillips,
Lonette McKee, and Herbie Hancock
(music composed and directed by
Hancock).
Jazz pianist Teddy Wilson died in
August, 1986, at the age of 73. Wilson,
who spent much of his career as a
soloist and leader of his own small
combos, first came to international at­tention
as a performer with the Benny
Goodman trio and orchestra during
the 1930s. In his later years Wilson
resided in Connecticut, where he per­formed
regularly with his two sons,
Theodore and Steve Wilson. Another
notable passing was that of jazz
trumpeter Thad Jones, who died in
Copenhagen, Denmark, also in Au­gust
of 1986. Jones will be remem­bered
for his arrangements for the
poll-winning band that was regularly
featured on Monday nights at the Vil­lage
Vanguard in New York City from
1965 to 1978. A prolific composer, a
few of his notable compositions in­clude
"Mean What You Say," "Con­summation,"
"Fingers," and "Little
Pixie."
The Underground Railroad Theatre
marked its tenth anniversary in June,
1986, Now based in Cambridge, Mas­sachusetts,
the company was origi­nally
founded in Oberlin, Ohio (an
actual station along the historic
Underground Railroad), and was
brought to New England in 1979 by
its cofounders, Wes Sanders and
Debra Wise. The current production
of the company is a work called
Sanctuary: The Spirit of Harriet T11b111n11,
which is now touring the northeast­ern
and southeastern states. Musical
selections from the production in­clude
Negro spirituals, Latin folk
tunes, and a song composed by Walter
Robinson, entitled "Life[ine," which
memorializes Tubman. Information
Conti11ued on page 20
20
News and Notes, continued
about the group may be obtained by
calling 617/497-6136.
Composer Walter Robinson, of
Cambridge, was the subject of a half­hour
PBS program called Soundings,
produced by WGBH-TV (Boston) and
aired in July of 1986. Robinson has
recently completed a two-hour opera
entitled Look What a Wonder Jesus Has
Done, which is based on the subject
of antislavery activist Denmark Vesey
and the abortive slave rebellion in
Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822.
The opera fuses elements of gospel
music, jazz, and classic symphonic
styles. The world premiere of the
work is planned for Boston in 1987.
Composer Delores White, of
BMR Newsletter is devoted to the encourage­ment
and promotion of scholarship and cultural
activity in black American music and is in­tended
to serve as a medium for the sharing
of ideas and information regarding current and
future research and :activities in universities and
research centers.
Editor: Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.
Managing Associate Editor: Marsha J. Reisser
Cuyahoga Community College­Cleveland,
won second prize in the
Ithaca College Chora I Competition for
her setting of the poem "Mollie and
Maggie and Millie and Me" by e. e.
cummings. She was selected as the
recipient of the prize from among two
hundred nation-wide competitors.
The College Music Society now has
available the contents of the plenary
session Fact and Value in Contemporary
Musical Scholarship which was held in
Vancouver, British Columbia, on
November 8, 1985. Reflecting the dif­ferent
disciplinary agendas and
points of view of the American
Musicological Society, the College
Music Society, the Society for
Ethnomusicology, and the Society for
Music Theory, the booklet contains
the addresses given by the four pres-
BMR Newsletter is published by the Colum­bia
College Center for Black Music Research.
Information submitted for inclusion should be
mailed to: Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., Editor, Center
for Black Music Research, Columbia College,
600 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois
60605-1996.
Associate Editors: Calvert Bean, Jr., Orin Moe
Production Manager: Gerry Gall
idents and the respondents at theses­sion.
To obtain a copy, send a check
or money order for $5.00 to The Col­lege
Music Society, 1444 Fifteenth
Street, Boulder, CO 80302.
Lester Sullivan, archivist at the
Amistad Research Center, New Or­leans,
Louisiana, hosts a weekly
"Twentieth•Century Classical Show"
on WTUL-FM in New Orleans. He
welcomes the loan or donation of tape
recordings from composers who
would like to have their works aired.
He would also appreciate any inform­ative
comments, either taped or
written, concerning the composi­tions.
Mr. Sullivan may be contacted
at the Amistad Research Center,
Tulane University, 6823 St. Charles
Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70118. Tele­phone:
504/865-5535.
Inquiries regarding subscription, as weU as
subscription payments of $2.00 per volume,
should be sent to:
Publications, Center for Black Music Research
Columbia College Chicago
600 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, JIJinois 60605-1996
Designer: Mary Johnson
Typesetter: Anita Strejc
..
Updated Music List
Six Composers of Nineteenth-Century New Orleans
BMR Newsletter, Vol. 9, No. 1
The following List consists of all of the
works given in the music lists for "Com­posers
Comer" :in BMR Newsletter, Vol.
9, No. I with the addition of many more
works by Edmond Dede, Lucien
Lambert, and Sidney Lambert which are
held in the Biblioteque Nationale in
Paris. In some cases this additional
information provides publication
information for works listed in the "Com­posers
Comer" article. As in the former
list, the locations where the compositions
are held are indicated as follows.
* Held by the Center for Black Music
Research, in photocopy format
t Held, most in photocopy format, by
the Amistad Reseaich Center, New
Orleans, Louisiana
t Held by the Tulane University
Library, New Orleans, Louisiana
§ Held by the Biblioteque Nationale,
Paris, France
The Music of Basile Bares
*t Basile's Galop, Op. 9, for piano.
New Orleans: A. E. Blackmar, 1869.
*t La belle Creole: Quadrille des
lanciers americains, for piano. New
Orleans, A. Elie, 1866.
*H La capricieuse: Valse, Op. 7, for
piano. New Orleans: A. E. Blackmar,
1869. Reprinted in Music and Some
Highly Musical People, James M.
Trotter, pp. [Appendix] 60-68. New
York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1\168.
t:t Les cent gardes: Valse, Op. 22, for
piano. New Orleans: [Louis
Grunewald], 1874.
ft La coquette: Grande polka de salon,
for piano. New Orleans: A. Elie,
1866.
t La course: Galop brillante, for piano.
New Orleans: A. E. Blackmar, 1866.
* La Creole: Polka mazurka, for piano.
New Orleans: A. E. Blackmar, 1884.
*t La Creole: Souvenir de la Louisiane,
Marche, Op. 10, for piano. New
Orleans: A. E. Blackmar, 1869.
*t+ Delphine: Grande valse brillante, Op.
11, for piano. New Orleans: Louis
Grunewald, 1870.
Elodia: Polka Mazurka, for piano.
n.p., n.d.
H Exhibition Waltz, for piano. New
Orleans: L. Grunewald, 1870.
*H Les folies du carnaval: Grande valse
brillante, for piano. New Orleans:
A. E. Blackmar, cl 867.
Les fus~s musicales (by 1865). n.p.,
n.d.
t+ Galop du carnaval, Op. 24, for piano.
New Orleans: Louis Grunewald,
1875.
H Grande polka des chasseurs, a pied
de la Louisiane, for piano. New
Orleans: Basile/fol ti & Simon, 1860.
*H Regina: Valse, Op. 29, for piano.
New Orleans: Louis Grunewald,
1881.
*t+ La s~duisante: Grande valse bril­lante,
for piano. n.p., c1867.
*+ Les varietes du carnaval, Op. 23, for
piano. New Orleans: Louis
Grunewald, 1875.
t Les violettes: Valse, Op. 25, for
piano. New Orleans: Louis
Grunewald, 1876.
*t The Wedding: Heel and Toe Polka,
Op. 26, arrangement for piano. n.p.:
J. Flanner, 1880.
The Music of Edmond Dede
Ables, ballet n.p., n.d.
L' Abile de la chouette: Feerie (dra­matic
piece). n.p., n.d.
§ Les Adieux du coursier: Chant
dramatique oriental, for voice. Paris:
E. Fromont, 1888.
tt La louisianaise: Valse brillante, for §
piano. New Orleans: A. E. Blackmar,
1884.
L'Amour! c'est-y bon? Bordeaux,
France: E. Philibert, 1877.
L' Anneau du diable: Feerie (dra­matic
piece) in three acts. n.p., 1880.
The Magic Belles (by 1865). n.p.,
n.d.
*H Mamie Waltz, Op. 27, for piano.
New Orleans: Junius Hart, 1880.
Mardi Gras Reminiscences: Waltz,
for piano. n.p., n.d.
tt Merry Fifty Lancers, Op. 21, for
piano. New Orleans: Philip Werlein, §
1873.
Minuit: Polka de salon, for piano.
n.p., n.d. §
*H Minuit: Valse de salon, Op. 19, for
piano. New Orleans: Henry
Wehrmann, 1873.
L' Antropohage, operetta in one act.
n.p., 1880.
Apres le miel, opera comique. n.p.,
1880.
Arcadia ouverture, for orchestra. n.p.,
n.d.
Battez aux Champs: Cantate dediee a L. M. l'Empereur Napoleon IIl.
Manuscript, 1865.
Bikina: Conseil hygienique.
Bordeaux: Emile Marchand, 1881.
Bordeaux: Grnnd valse. n.p., n.d.
Les Canotiers de Lorment, ballet­divertissement.
n.p., 1880.
2
Caryatis, ballet-divertissement. n.p.,
n.d.
§ C'est la fautc a Colas, for voice.
Paris: L. Couderc, 188 I.
Chant dramat.ique, for orchestra. n.p.,
n.d.
* § Chicago: Grand valse a I' arnericaine,
for piano. Paris: E. Fromont, 1892.
§ Chicago: Grande Valse a l'amfai­caine,
for orchestra. Paris: E.
Fromont, 1891.
Chile-King-Fe, operetta in one act
n.p., 1878.
§ Comme une socur, for voice. Paris:
§
§
§
§
§
F. Guillemain, I 887.
La Conspiration des amoureu,c:
D'apr~s le Pronunciarnento Marche
espagnole, for voice. Paris: BathlOL
et Heraud, 1887.
Cora la Bordelaise, for voice.
Bordeaux: E. Philibert, 1881.
Cora la Bordelaise, for voice. 2nd
edition. Paris: Vve Gheluve, 1881.
En Chasse: Mazurka elegante, for
orchestra, by Eugene Dede. Edited
by Edmond Dede. Paris: n.p., 1891.
Diana et Acteon, ballet-divertisse­ment.
n.p., n.d.
Ellis, ballet n.p., n.d.
Emilie. n.p., n.d.
L'Ermitage ou !'hospice de Sl.
Vincent de Paul a Pouy pres Dax
(Landes): Romance religieuse, for
voice. Bordeaux: E. Philibert, 1855.
Les etudiants bordclais, operetta in
one acl. n.p., 1883.
Les fau,c mandarins, ballet. n.p., n.d.
§ Francoise et Cortillard, for voice.
Bordeaux: E. Philibert, 1877.
§ Le Garyon troquct: Chanson-type,
for voice. Paris: Raymond Viel et
Masson, 1887.
Le grillon du foyer, operetta. n.p.,
n.d.
§ J'la connaist, for voice. Paris: chez
Duhem, 1884.
§ La Joumce Champetre, for chorus.
Paris: E. Fromont, 1890.
§ Kikipatchouli et Kakaoli: Duo
chinois, for vocal duet. Paris: G.
Ondet, 1891.
§ La Klephte: Chant. drarnatique ori­ental.
Paris: E. Fromont, 1888.
§ La Malagaise: Seguedille, for voice.
Paris: E. Fromont, 1888.
§ Le Marinde la France: Chansonnette
de bord. Bordeaux: E. Philibert,
1855.
§ Mephisto masque: Polka fantastique,
for piano. Paris: L. Bathlot et
Heraud, 1889.
§
§
§
t
§
§
§
Mephisto masque: Polka fantastique,
for orchestra. Paris: L. Bathlot et
Heraud, 1889.
Mirliton fin de siccle: Polka ori­ginate,
for orchestra. Paris: E.
Fromont, 1891.
Mirlitoo fin de sicclc: Polka ori­ginate,
for piano and mirliton. Paris:
E. Fromont, 1898.
Mon beau Tyrolicn: Tyrolienne com­ique.
Bordeaux: E. Philibert, 1876.
Mon pauvrc cocur, for voice. n.p.,
1852.
Mon sous off, for voice. Bordeau,c:
E. Philibert, 1876.
Mon sous off' cier: Quadrille brillam,
for orchestra. Bordeaux: E. Philibert,
1877.
Nchana, rcinc des f'ccs, ballet in one
act. n.p., 1862.
Le Noye, opera comique. n.p., n.d.
Les nymphes et chasseurs, ballet in
one acl. n.p., 1880.
Ous'qu'cst mon toreador?, for voice.
Paris: Bathlot et Heraud, 1889.
Le Palmier ouvcrtiure, for orchestra.
n.p., n.d.
Papillon bleu: Grand valse. n.p., n.d.
Paris: Grand valsc. n.p., n.d.
Patriotisme, ballad. n.p., n.d.
La phoceenne: Grand valse. n.p., n.d.
§ El Pronunciamento (la conspira~:on):
Marche espagnole, for piano. Paris:
Bathlot el Heraud, 1886.
Quadrille. n.p., n.d.
§ Quasimodo, for voice. Bordeaux: E.
Philibert, 1865.
§ Quasimodo, for voice. Bordeaux: E.
Philiben, I 869.
§ R~verie champctre: Fantaisie, duet
for violin and violoncello or flute
and bassoon with piano accompani­ment
Paris: Author, 1891.
§ Rosita: Cancion Se vii lanne, for
voice. Paris: J. Pou la lion, 1890.
La sensitive, ballet in two acts. n.p.,
1877.
Si j'etais Jui, for voice. n.p., n.d.
§ Le Serment de I' Araibe: Chant
dramatique, for voice. Bordeaux: E.
Philibert, 1865.
*t "Le scrment de I' Arabe," a dramatic
aria from Sultan d 'Ispahan.
Reprinted in Music and Some Highly
Musical People, James M. Trotter,
pp. [Appendix] 53-59. New York:
Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968.
§ Si tu m'aimais. Arrangement of the
melody by R. Van Erbs. n.p., 1893.
§
§
Spahis et Grisettes, ballet­divertissement
in one act. n.p., 1880.
Sultan d'Ispahan, opera in four acts.
n.p., n.d.
Sylvia, overture. n.p., n.d.
Symphony ("Quasimodo," by 1865).
n.p., n.d.
Titis: d~bardcurs et griseues, for
voice. Paris: Smite, 1876.
Tond les chiens, coup'les chats: Duo
burlesque, for voice. Paris: Puigellier
& Bassereau, 1893.
Le triomphe de Bacchus, ballet­divertissement.
n.p., 1880.
Une aventure de 'Thlemaque, opera.
n.p., n.d.
r ..
§ Une Noce en musique: Chansonnene
comique. Paris: Balhlot et H~ud,
1889.
Vaillant belle rose quadrille. n.p.,
n.d.
The Music of Lucien Lambert
Ah, vous disaise-je maman, piano
transcription. n.p., n.d.
§ Ah! vous dirai-je maman: Caprice,
for piano, Op. 33. Paris: Colombier,
1861.
§ L' Amaronc: Caprice mazurka, for
piano, Op. 67. Paris: Colombier,
1890.
§ L'Americaine: Grande valse bril­lante,
for piano. Paris: Colombier,
1866.
§ Adagio du trio, Op. 11, by
Beethoven. Arrangement for piano.
Manuscript, I 862.
§ Andante ct fantaisie [illegible). for
piano and orchestra. Paris: Heugel,
1892.
§ L' Angelus au monast~re: Pri~e. for
piano. Paris: Impr. de Dinquel, 1854.
§ L' Angelus au monast~rc, ct le
Depart 2 Romances sans paroles, for
piano. Paris: J. Heinz, 1862.
§ Au bord du ruisseau. Paris: Heugel,
1895.
§ Au clair de la lune: Variations et
final, for piano, Op. 30. Paris:
Colombier, 1859.
*H Au clair de la lune, Op. 30. Paris:
Emile Gallet, n.d. Reprinted in Music
and Some Highly Musical People.
James M. Trotter, pp. [Appendix]
69-80. New York: Johnson Reprint
Corp., 1968.
§ Aubade, for voice and piano. Paris:
Comard, 1886.
Bruneau. Transcribed for piano, four
hands. Manuscript, 1902.
§ Les Bords du Rhin: Polka brillante,
for piano. Paris: J. Heinz, 1861.
§ La Bresiliennc: Polka brillante, for
piano, Op. 58. Paris: Colombier,
1864.
§ Bresiliana: Fantaisie caprice brillant,
for piano. Paris: J. Heinz, 1869.
§ Bresiliana: Grande valse brillante,
for piano. Paris: au Menestrel. 1875.
§ Broceliande: Opera feerique in four
acts, piano-vocal score. Paris: au
Menestrel, 1892.
§ Le Calabrais: Galop brillant, for
piano, Op. 39. Paris: Colombier,
1861.
§ La Canadienne: Polka brillante, for
piano, Op. 34. Paris: Colombier,
1861.
§ Caprice mazurka, for piano. Paris:
Mackar et Noel, 1891.
§ Le Camaval de Paris: Variations bril­lantes
sur une chanson populaire de
L. Abadie, for piano, Op. 36. Paris:
Heugel, 1861.
§ Le Camaval venitien: Quadrille bril­lant,
for piano. Paris: Colombier,
18(i().
§ Le Carnaval vcnitien: Quadrille bril­lant,
for piano, four hands. Paris:
Colombier, 1861.
§ Le CastiJlan: Bol6ro, for piano. Paris:
J. Heinz, 1861.
§ Chanson cosaque, for voice and
piano, with choir ad lib. Paris:
Heugel, 1893.
§ Chanson de nourrice, for voice.
Paris: Heugel, 1896.
§ Chants d'oiseause: Melodie, for
chorus and piano. Paris: H. Tellier,
1890.
§ Berceuse. Arrangement of the song §
by L. M. Gottschalk. Paris: A. Noel,
1898.
Les Cloches de Porto: Tableau musi­cal.
Orchestral reduction. Manu­script,
1912.
§ La Belle au bois dormant: Poeme *§ Cloches et clochencs: Etude mazurka
symphonique pour orchestrc, by Alf.
3
brillante, Op. 31, for piano. Paris:
Colombier, 1859.
§ Les Cygncs: Melodie, for voice and
piano. Paris: Bruneau, 1890.
§ Daniella: Polka brillanle, for piano.
Paris: J. Heinz, 1857.
§ Daniella: Polka de salon, for piano,
four hands. Paris: J. Heinz, 1869.
§ Delhi: Polka-mazurka, for piano.
Paris: J. Heinz, 1858.
§ Le depart du conscric Fantaisie­marche,
Op. 32, for piano. Paris:
Colombicr, 1859.
§ En Avant: Galop brillant, for piano,
Op. 45. Paris: Colombier, 1864.
§ Entr'acte to act II, from Le Spahi:
Pocme lyrique, for piano. Paris:
l 'fllustration, 1897.
§ Esquisscs creoles, for orchestra.
Transcribed for piano, four hands.
Paris: n.p., 1898.
Etude-mazurka. n.p., n.d.
§ Fantaisie hongroise, for piano. Paris:
Colombier, 1884.
§ La Flamenca, musical drama in four
acts, piano-vocal score. Paris:
Choudens, 1903.
§ God Save the Queen: English Na­tional
Anthem. Arrangement for
piano, Op. 43. Paris: M. Colombicr,
1862.
§ God Save the Queen (English Na­tional
Anthem). Arrangement for
piano. Paris: Colombier, 1881.
§
§
Hymnis: Drame antique in one act,
for voice and piano with flute or
violin accompaniment. Score and
parts. Paris: Bruneau, 1889.
La juive. n.p., n.d.
Jupiter: Grande polka brillante, for
piano. Paris: J. Heinz, 1859.
§ Legende roumaine d'apr~ des motifs
populaires. Orchestral reduction for
piano, four hands. Paris: Heugel,
1893.
§ La Lyonnaise: Polka-mazurka, for
piano. Paris: Chorel, 1856.
4
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
La L yonnaisc: Polka-mazurka, for
piano. 2nd edition. Paris: au
M6ncs11el, 1857.
Marche fun~brc, for piano, Op 66.
Paris: Colombicr, 1890.
Marlborough: F'antaisie mililaire, for
piano. Paris: F. Janet. 1861.
Marlborough: F'antaisic mili1aire, for
piano. Paris: Colombier, l 881.
La Marseillaise: Oeuvre lyrique, in
one act, piano-vocal score. Paris:
Choudcns, 1900.
Le Niagara: Grande valse brillantc,
for piano, Op. 29. Paris: Colombicr,
1860.
Nouveaux Excrcices journaliers ex-
11aits des Sonates de Beethoven:
Classes et do1gtes. 2 vols. Paris:
Colombier, 1882.
§ Olga: Polka-mazurka, for piano.
Paris: H. Lemoine, 1861.
f§ Ombres aimccs: Reve, for piano, Op.
35. Paris: Colombier, 186 I.
§ L'Onde et Jes roscaux: Grande valsc,
for piano. Paris: J. Heinz, 1859.
§ Ouvcnure de Broceliandc. Paris:
Heugel, 189 I.
Paris, Viennc. n.p., n.d.
§ La Parisienne: Polka brillante, for
piano. Paris: Choret. 1856.
& La Parisiennc: Polka brillante, for
piano. 2nd edition. Paris: au
M6nes11el, 1857.
§ La Penticosa: Drame lyrique in two
acts. Paris: Soci~te musicale G.
Asltuc & Co, 1908.
§ La Pfauvienne: 2me grande polka,
for piano. Paris: au Mencstrel, 185'J.
§ La Peruvienne: 2me grande polka,
for piano. 2nd edition. Paris: au
Mencstrel, 1860.
§ Plaisir des champs: Marceau de
genre, for piano, Op. 60. Paris:
Colombier, 1861.
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
Pluie de Corails. n.p., n.d.
Polka havanaise. for piano. Paris: au
M6nestrel, 1862.
Prelude, fugue ct post! udc, for piano.
Manuscript, 1924.
Reve de bonhcur: Polka-mazurka, for
piano. Paris: 0. Legouise, 1860.
Rcve de bonhcur: Polka-mazurka.
Arranged for piano, four hands by
A. Bouleau-Neldy. Paris: de
Moucelot, I 866.
Le Reve du solitaire: Contemplation,
for piano. Op. 28. Paris: J. Heinz,
1859.
Le Roi Dorgobert: Caprice, for
piano, Op. 44. Paris: ColombiCJ',
1862.
Rose de Noel: Polka mazurka, for
piano. Paris: J. Heinz. 1864.
La rose et le Bengali: Inspiration,
Op. 4, for piano. Paris: L. Escudier,
1854.
La Roussalka: Ballet-Pantomime in
two acts, full score. Paris: Choudcns,
191 I.
Ruisseau d'automne! Paris:
Choudens, 1905.
Sire Olaf: Lcgende dramatique in
three acts. Paris: J. Hameffe, 1888.
Le Spahj: Poome lyriquc in four acts.
Paris: Choudens, 1897.
3 Melodies, for voice and piano. I.
Aubade, II. A 1 'i nnommee. III.
L'ame en dcuil. Paris: Bruneau,
1889.
Voix celestcs: Reverie, for piano,
Op. 40. Paris: Colombicr, 1872.
Venise: Improvisation sur le
Carnaval de Vcnise, for piano. Paris:
Colombier, 1890.
The Music of Sidney Lambert
§ L' Africaine, Op. 14., ltanScription
for piano. Paris: Brondus, 1872.
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
§
L' Allegresse: Grande valse brillant~,
for piano, Op. 6. Paris: A. Cl H.
Lu inzard Frcrcs, 1868.
Anna Solena, de Donizetti: Petite
fantaisie, for piano. Paris: M.
Colombier, 1872.
Le Cam~lia: Mazurke de salon, for
piano, Op. 21. Paris: L. Gregh. 1882.
Cassilda: Valsc de salon, for piano.
Paris: Loret & Sons and H. Freytag,
1899.
Ccl~bre Tarcntcllc, by Louis Moreau
Gottschalk. Arranged for two pianos,
four hands. Paris: n.p., 1890.
Les Clochcttcs: Fantaisie Mazurka,
Op. 9. Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1872.
(Reprinted in Music and Some
llighly Musical People, James M.
Trotter, pp. (Appendix] 86-95. New
York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968.)
La Coquette: Schottisch, for piano.
n.p.: Author, 1866.
L'Elisire d'amore, opera de
Donizetti: Petite fantaisie, for piano.
Paris: M. Colombier, 1870.
L'Elisire d'amorc, opera de
Donizetti: Fanlaisie, Op. 8, for piano.
Paris: A. Leduc, 1872.
Fleurs aimces: Mazurka, for piano.
Paris: Lorct & Sons, 1889.
Flcurs aim6cs: Polka-mazurka, for
piano. Paris: M. Colombier, 1880.
Gavotte, from L'A/bum du jeune
pianiste. for piano. Paris: LorcL &
Sons, 1887.
Marchc des demoisclles, for piano.
Paris: Lorct & Sons and H. Freytag,
1895.
Mazurka Tyrolienne, for piano, Op.
11. Paris: A. Leduc. 1873.
Mazurka Tyrolicnne, for piano. 2nd
edition. Paris: A. Leduc, 1874.
§ Menuet, for piano. Paris: M.
Colombier, 1883.
§ Mon Etoile: Celebre valse, by F. A.
Rcnte. Arrangement for piano. Paris:
n.p., 1872.
§ Murmures du Soir: Caprice, for
piano, Op. 18. Paris: J. Hillard,
1876.
§ Ninette: Valse, for piano. Paris:
Loret & Sons and H. Freytag, 1896.
§ Ninon: Valse, for piano. Paris: Loret
& Sons and H. Freytag, 1897.
§ Ninon-Ninette: Menuet, for piano.
Paris: Loret & Sons and H. Freytag,
1896.
§ 0 Sanctissima, for piano, Op. 17.
Paris: M. Colombier, 1876.
§ Perle haitienne: Polka-mazurka, for
piano, Op. 3. Paris: M. Colombier,
1867.
§ Petite Fantaisie sur "La Som•
nambule," by V. Bellini. Arrange­ment
for piano. Paris: n.p., 1872.
§ Premieres l~ons de piano ~ la ponce
des enfants du 1. ~ge, Op. 28. Paris:
Loret & Sons, 1886.
* Rescue Polka Mazurka, for piano.
Providence, R.I.: Cory Brothers,
1869.
§ Romance de "La Cruche cass6e":
opera-comique, by Emile Pessard.
Transcription for piano, Op. 12.
Paris: A. Leduc, 1873.
§ Si j'etais roi, d'A. S. Adam: Reverie,
for piano. Paris: A. Leduc, 1868.
§ La Sonnambule (Petite fantaisie sur
I~). Op. 10, for piano. Paris: A.
Leduc, 1872.
t Stella mon etoile: Celebre valse. Ar­rangement
of the melody of the same
name composed by F. A. Rente. New
Orleans: Philip Werlein, 1879.
§ Les Sylphes: Impromptu, for piano,
Op. 13. Paris: A. Leduc, 1873.
§ Transport joyeux: Valse de salon, for
piano. Op. 16. Paris: J. Hielard,
1874.
§ Transport joyeux: Valse de salon, for
piano. 2nd edition. Paris: J. Hielard,
1875.
§ Valse caprice, for piano, Op. 23.
Paris: L. Gregh, 1883.
§ Valse caprice, for piano, Op. 23. 2nd
edition. Paris: L. Gregh, 1884.
§ Vive la Polka, for piano. Paris: M.
Ravelet, 1882.
The Music of Eugene V.
Macarty
*t+ Fleurs de salon: 2 Favorite Polkas
("L' Alzea: Polka mazurka" and "La
Caprifolia: Polka de salon"), arrange­ment
for piano. New Orleans: n.p.,
1854.
The Music of Samuel Snaer
Allegro. n.p., n.d.
Le bohemien (by 1877). 111.p .• n.d.
5
t Chant bachique, for male choir.
Manuscript. n.d.
Le chant des canotiers. n.p., n.d.
*t Le chant du deporte, for voice. New
Orleans: Louis Grunewald, 1865.
Donnez, mes chhes amours. n.p.,
n.d.
Grand scene lyrique. n.p .. , n.d.
Graziella Overture, for orchestra.
n.p., n.d.
t Magdalena: Valse, for piano. Manu­script.
n.d.
* Mass for Three Voices. "Gloria" and
"Agnus Dei" reprinted in Music and
Some Highly Musical People, James
M. Trotter, pp. [Appendix] 127-152.
New York: Johnson Reprint Corp.,
1968.
t+ Rappelle-toi, for voice. New Orleans:
Louis Grunewald, 1865.
*H Sous sa fenetre, for voice. New
Orleans: Louis Grunewald, 1866.
Le vampire. n.p., n.d.